NTFS stores data more efficently that FAT or FAT32. This will give
you more storage space on your drive as you put more and more files
onto the system. Further, NTFS allows for more security options than
FAT or FAT32 such as encryption.
If you are comfortable with FAT32 then you don't necessarily have to
change.
Regards,
Clinton R. Fitch III
Partner
C3 Technology
http://www.c3-technology.com
NTFS gives you the option to turn on compression. You can compress
existing data, and if you set the compression property on a directory
anything you put there will be compressed. Compression is utterly
transparent to your applications. Compress/decompress is done at the
file system level. YMMV as to how must space compression gets
you. I've seen 20:1 compression for ascii numeric data. OTOH TIF image
files compress very little.
I've compressed the entire C drive (C:\ and everything under it) many
times on systems that needed space. This was when we had 2GB disks.
I've never seen NTFS compression screw up.
There is no downside to compression that I can see, except I wouldn't
put a serious database there becuse a record insertion would require
the decompression/recompression of the entire file. The CPU cycles
needed to compress or decompress are offset by the reduction in the
number of blocks that need to be moved from the disk.
