Hard Drive-new install-which format?

  • Thread starter Thread starter JEC
  • Start date Start date
J

JEC

Hello,

Installing a 120Gb WD HDD, OS is XP Home, P4 2.8Mhz. I'm still deciding how
I'm going to (if I'm going to) partition the drive however, I was wondering,
How should I format the drive? NTFS or FAT32? What are the
advantages/disadvantages? What is the difference? Will it make a difference?

Thanks in advance!
 
Can't speak for all the advantages for NTFS but consider that for FAT32
you've got a 4gig file size limit, and if you do video editing you'll be in
difficult straits.

I picked this up on the Internet doing a quick search. It may be of help
to you

Criteria
NTFS5
NTFS
FAT32
FAT16

Operting System
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows NT
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows 98
Windows ME
Windows 2000
Windows XP
DOS
All versions of
Microsoft Windows



Limitations

Max Volume Size
2TB
2TB
2TB
2GB

Max Files on Volume
Nearly Unlimited
Nearly Unlimited
Nearly Unlimited
~65000

Max File Size
Limit Only by
Volume Size
Limit Only by
Volume Size
4GB
2GB

Max Clusters Number
Nearly Unlimited
Nearly Unlimited
268435456
65535

Max File Name Length
Up to 255
Up to 255
Up to 255
Standard - 8.3
Extended - up to 255



File System Features

Unicode File Names
Unicode Character Set
Unicode Character Set
System Character Set
System Character Set

System Records Mirror
MFT Mirror File
MFT Mirror File
Second Copy of FAT
Second Copy of FAT

Boot Sector Location
First and Last Sectors
First and Last Sectors
First Sector
First Sector

File Attributes
Standard and Custom
Standard and Custom
Standard Set
Standard Set

Alternate Streams
Yes
Yes
No
No

Compression
Yes
Yes
No
No

Encryption
Yes
No
No
No

Object Permissions
Yes
Yes
No
No

Disk Quotas
Yes
No
No
No

Sparse Files
Yes
No
No
No

Reparse Points
Yes
No
No
No

Volume Mount Points
Yes
No
No
No



Overall Performance

Built-In Security
Yes
Yes
No
No

Recoverability
Yes
Yes
No
No

Performance
Low on small volumes
High on Large
Low on small volumes
High on Large
High on small volumes
Low on large
Highest on small volumes
Low on large

Disk Space Economy
Max
Max
Average
Minimal on large volumes

Fault Tolerance
Max
Max
Minimal
Average
 
JEC said:
Hello,

Installing a 120Gb WD HDD, OS is XP Home, P4 2.8Mhz. I'm still deciding how
I'm going to (if I'm going to) partition the drive however, I was wondering,
How should I format the drive? NTFS or FAT32? What are the
advantages/disadvantages? What is the difference? Will it make a difference?

Thanks in advance!
Click to expand...

NTFS for sure
better security better fault tolerance and better cluster size on large
partitions
 
NTFS is the professional format that is more stable and has better security.
FAT 32 is a leftover from the Win 9x days.
 
DaveW said:
NTFS is the professional format that is more stable and has better security.
FAT 32 is a leftover from the Win 9x days.
Click to expand...

NTFS is crap. It offers no security advantages over FAT32 thanks
to some widely available DOS NTFS drivers. NTFS is also much, MUCH
more difficult to do a crash recovery on it unless you are very
savvy with those DOS NTFS drivers. If you do go with NTFS, backups
become much more necessary. I've had to a few Win XP recoveries the
past few months for clients and that's made me want to have all new
PC's fitted with Fat32 and Win2K. XP Home is also crap - if you
have to get XP, get the Pro version and be sure to install at
least 512 Mb of memory and still be prepared to wait -- XP will
become insanely slow in a few months of use on anything less than
a high powered Athlon or P4 system.

-BC
 
BC said:
.... snip ...

NTFS is crap. It offers no security advantages over FAT32 thanks
to some widely available DOS NTFS drivers. NTFS is also much, MUCH
more difficult to do a crash recovery on it unless you are very
savvy with those DOS NTFS drivers. If you do go with NTFS, backups
become much more necessary. I've had to a few Win XP recoveries the
Click to expand...
.... snip ...

Are you claiming the journalizing doesn't work? According to
Helen Custers 1994 book on it the recovery should be automatic.
Of course real physical crashes, such as grinding heads into media
or digging other holes are generally impossible to recover in any
medium.
 
CBFalconer said:
... snip ...

Are you claiming the journalizing doesn't work? According to
Helen Custers 1994 book on it the recovery should be automatic.
Of course real physical crashes, such as grinding heads into media
or digging other holes are generally impossible to recover in any
medium.
Click to expand...

Journaling is a pretty useless feature for typical desktop use.
Hard drive failures on cheap IDE's tend to be catastophic -- the
drive or its control circuit goes and that's it for the drive and
anything on it. More robust server drives will sometimes start to
go bad in a way that gives you some lead time, but Windows NT/2K/XP
based servers are a joke compared to the robustness of even old
Netware boxes when it comes to dealing with failing server drives,
journaling or not.

And the weak link is the Windows OS, not the file system. Whatever
advantages journaling has in theory, they seem to be completely
lost in Microsoft's implementation of it. You all of a sudden start
getting BSOD's or inaccessible drives, and journaling seems to be
then of little or no use. Better that you can boot off a floppy
and get your stuff off before you return your notebook back to the
store or before some dim tech support person tells you to boot off
the Recovery CD.

-BC
 
Back
Top