Fat limits

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GT

Installing my new SATA drive. I am currently booted into WinXP on my
existing IDE drive. I have installed the new SATA drive in the case and it
is recognised in drive management and I have partitioned it into 50GB system
and the rest (400GB ish) for files. I intend to swap the drives round and
install WinXP on my newer, faster drive.

WinXP can only format a partition up to 32GB as Fat32, so my 50GB partition
will have to be NTFS, but I occasionally boot (on CD) to DOS and LINUX, so
NTFS is no good. I have found a utility that will format my 50GB partittion
as fat32, so I can then install XP on it, but I just wondered what everyone
had to say on the matter of FAT32 vs NTFS for a 50GB system (WinXP)
partition on a new WD5000KS SATA drive. Am I likely to see a performance
difference between the 2 formats?
 
GT said:
Installing my new SATA drive. I am currently booted into WinXP on my
existing IDE drive. I have installed the new SATA drive in the case and it
is recognised in drive management and I have partitioned it into 50GB
system and the rest (400GB ish) for files. I intend to swap the drives
round and install WinXP on my newer, faster drive.

WinXP can only format a partition up to 32GB as Fat32, so my 50GB
partition will have to be NTFS, but I occasionally boot (on CD) to DOS and
LINUX, so NTFS is no good. I have found a utility that will format my 50GB
partittion as fat32, so I can then install XP on it, but I just wondered
what everyone had to say on the matter of FAT32 vs NTFS for a 50GB system
(WinXP) partition on a new WD5000KS SATA drive. Am I likely to see a
performance difference between the 2 formats?
Click to expand...

You should be aware that there are NTFS drivers around for both DOS and
Linux these days.
 
Installing my new SATA drive. I am currently booted into WinXP on my
existing IDE drive. I have installed the new SATA drive in the case and it
is recognised in drive management and I have partitioned it into 50GB system
and the rest (400GB ish) for files. I intend to swap the drives round and
install WinXP on my newer, faster drive.

WinXP can only format a partition up to 32GB as Fat32, so my 50GB partition
will have to be NTFS, but I occasionally boot (on CD) to DOS and LINUX, so
NTFS is no good. I have found a utility that will format my 50GB partittion
as fat32, so I can then install XP on it, but I just wondered what everyone
had to say on the matter of FAT32 vs NTFS for a 50GB system (WinXP)
partition on a new WD5000KS SATA drive. Am I likely to see a performance
difference between the 2 formats?
Click to expand...

If you really need Dos and Linux to be able to access your drive,
I would suggest using a 3rd partition for that purpose.
E.g.: 50 GB NTFS Windows boot, 10 GB FAT32, 490 GB NTFS.

The vaste majority of files, found on a Windows PC are totally
useless to either Dos or Linux anyway :-)

Generally, it is not a good idea to allow either Dos or Linux to
write to NTFS partitions on a regular basis.
 
[snip]
WinXP can only format a partition up to 32GB as Fat32, so my 50GB
partition will have to be NTFS, but I occasionally boot (on CD) to DOS and
LINUX, so NTFS is no good. I have found a utility that will format my 50GB
partittion as fat32, so I can then install XP on it, but I just wondered
what everyone had to say on the matter of FAT32 vs NTFS for a 50GB system
(WinXP) partition on a new WD5000KS SATA drive. Am I likely to see a
performance difference between the 2 formats?
Click to expand...

I can work round and DOS problems with boot disks and even another partition
if necessary. I just want the fastest setup I can achieve, so is there a
performance difference between FAT32 and NTFS? A few websites say NTFS would
be faster as it is newer and more efficient. Others say it will be slowed
due to extra security overheads. I have always used FAT32 for the system
partition and NTFS for the 'files' partition before, but I have never
installed a drive of this size before and the system partition has usually
been around 20GB.
 
Installing my new SATA drive. I am currently booted into WinXP on my
existing IDE drive. I have installed the new SATA drive in the case and it
is recognised in drive management and I have partitioned it into 50GB system
and the rest (400GB ish) for files. I intend to swap the drives round and
install WinXP on my newer, faster drive.

WinXP can only format a partition up to 32GB as Fat32, so my 50GB partition
will have to be NTFS, but I occasionally boot (on CD) to DOS and LINUX, so
NTFS is no good. I have found a utility that will format my 50GB partittion
as fat32, so I can then install XP on it, but I just wondered what everyone
had to say on the matter of FAT32 vs NTFS for a 50GB system (WinXP)
partition on a new WD5000KS SATA drive. Am I likely to see a performance
difference between the 2 formats?
Click to expand...


You can use a typical Win9x boot disk to fdisk and format a
drive to FAT32. It has no 32GB limit. Older versions of
FDISK may report the size wrong beyond 64GB, so you merely
ignore that and spec the size in % or the value that it
reports plus (n * 64GB) as the total.

FAT32 will do fine for WinXP system partition. The
performance differences are negligable, tend to only be
significant on particular benchmarks. If either is slightly
faster it would be FAT32, but not enough to matter for most
uses. Some of the early benchmarks

More significant is whether you needed some of the things
NTFS allows like security policy support, files > 4GB in
size, compression, or indexing (but some people turn that
off so YMMV). Some will make vague claims such as it is
more fault tolerant but IMO, if your OS is corrupting a
drive you'd have to fix that regardless of filesystem and
the more common hardware/drive failures will happen with
either filesystem. I often use FAT32 for a 2k/XP filesystem
and it works fine within it's limits. FAT32 seems fine for
your use if you can accept the limitations mentioned above.
 
I think you should keep XP intirely on NTFS. Arrange you other O/S on
separate partitions..
Maybe get (yet) another HD...you can get a standard 80 Gig for £25 to £30 .
Do remember as one poster has warned here that FAT32 can not make or use
files larger
than 4 Gigs .. quite a few games / video and many DVD copying tasks use more
than 4 Gig
mouse
@@@
 
I think you should keep XP intirely on NTFS. Arrange you other O/S on
separate partitions..
Maybe get (yet) another HD...you can get a standard 80 Gig for £25 to £30 .
Do remember as one poster has warned here that FAT32 can not make or use
files larger
than 4 Gigs .. quite a few games / video and many DVD copying tasks use more
than 4 Gig
mouse
@@@
Click to expand...

Actually I can't think of any games that make use of more
than 4GB files, unless you mean ripping the DVD to HDD and
using some emulation software - which is a valid use, if you
don't want to continually shuffle discs into a drive, but
even with video you can often spec file segments within 4GGB
boundary, it is more often a DVD rip or ISO that requires
NTFS.

However, this is only one partition on a much larger drive,
and the OS partition at that (which should ideally, not be
the storage space for such large volumes). It's not as
though having one FAT32 partiton would prevent windows from
using another partition for these tasks.
 
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