NTFS slower?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tom
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Tom

120 Gig WD drive, converted from FAT32 to NTFS and now everything (file/game
map loading) seems to take at least 20% longer.
Windows directory file access, etc. are all much slower.

I only converted because it was supposed to be faster.

Any ideas?
 
120 Gig WD drive, converted from FAT32 to NTFS and now everything (file/game
map loading) seems to take at least 20% longer.
Windows directory file access, etc. are all much slower.

I only converted because it was supposed to be faster.
Click to expand...

Have you defragmented since the conversion? The conversion can make a
mess of things.

NTFS is not always faster. It is much more secure, though. It also
allows files to be bigger than 4G in size. You can enable file
compression, which will free up disk space.
 
120 Gig WD drive, converted from FAT32 to NTFS and now everything (file/game
map loading) seems to take at least 20% longer.
Windows directory file access, etc. are all much slower.

I only converted because it was supposed to be faster.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...


I don't think that we can draw conclusions about NTFS from a system
that was converted from FAT32. As someone else said, do a defrag. I
would do wone with a commercial defrag product that runs stand-alone
and can defrag the swap file, and others.

I have no opinion about NTFS vs FAT32 as I have never done anything
but NTFS, which is necessary for computer security on a Microsoft
network.

Compression in NTFS systems is great, and in extreme cases has given
me large performance improvements. (GB text files that compressed 20:1
and were read-mostly) The CPU time to decompress the data stream was
much less than the time it took to read uncompressed data off the
disk. For systems that were running out of space on C I've compressed
the entire C file system. It worked fine.
 
Al said:
I don't think that we can draw conclusions about NTFS from a system
that was converted from FAT32. As someone else said, do a defrag. I
would do wone with a commercial defrag product that runs stand-alone
and can defrag the swap file, and others.
Click to expand...

Can you imagine if Google or Yahoo! had to defrag?

How can people consider Windows an Enterprise-capable system?
 
Tod said:
I've always been told Fat32 is faster then NTFS.
Click to expand...
Well, my benchmarks show that even after defragmentation, NTFS is almost 30%
slower,
What fn bullshit is that.

It would be a huge PITA to change back now.
 
Get better benchmarks. You will see worse performance for small files, but
equal for large files.
 
Eric Gisin said:
Get better benchmarks. You will see worse performance for small files, but
equal for large files.
Click to expand...
I'm using SiSandra, which is a generally accepted program for this.
I am about to go through the process of converting back, why shouldn't I?
 
Sometimes the conversion end up with 512 bytes clusters. MFT (Master File
Table. where all directory records are kept) may get fragmented, too.
The best approach is to freshly format a disk with NTFS, not use a
conversion.
 
Alexander Grigoriev said:
Sometimes the conversion end up with 512 bytes clusters. MFT (Master File
Table. where all directory records are kept) may get fragmented, too.
The best approach is to freshly format a disk with NTFS, not use a
conversion.
Click to expand...
I had the option of selecting this, but left it default.
What should I have selected?
 
The default 4K cluster size.

Here are differences that create FAT32 vs NTFS performance differences:

1. NTFS is fail-safe journalling file system. Before making any
modifications in the directory structure and allocation bitmap, it writes
journal
record, then commits the changes, then marks the journal record as
committed. If there is no hard errors on the disk, it pretty much guarantees
that a power fault or OS hang won't break the file system. FAT doesn't have
this, so it is corrupted easily by OS failure. This makes NTFS slower for
creating files or otherwise making *simple* modification to the file system.
NTFS also doesn't seem to cache directory accesses, while FAT does.

2. NTFS keeps directories sorted in binary trees. FAT uses linear files to
keep a directory. This makes access to a big NTFS directory very fast, while
with FAT it's pain, if a folder contains over a few hundred files. This also
may make modification of a big directory faster.
NTFS keeps all directory records in MFT which has its reserved area. FAT
directories can be scattered all over the disk.

3. FAT uses file allocation table chain to keep the cluster chain and to
allocate disk space. NTFS uses a bitmap file to keep track of free clusters
(one bit - one cluster) and describes the files in extents (contiguous areas
of disk space). This makes random access to large NTFS files much faster
(and its speed doesn't depend on the cluster size) than FAT.
 
Alexander Grigoriev said:
Sometimes the conversion end up with 512 bytes clusters. MFT (Master File
Table. where all directory records are kept) may get fragmented, too.
The best approach is to freshly format a disk with NTFS, not use a
conversion.
Click to expand...
I'm using Drive Image 7.0 to copy or image to newly formatted NTFS @ 4k, but
DI will not allow the expand feature in its product and after 3 days of
screwing with it, I'm ready to tell them what to do with it.
It is supposed to expand to new drive size, but it won't even do it going
from FAT32 to FAT32.

I can get around this problem by imaging to FAT32 and then converting to
NTFS, but I cannot force it to 4K clusters.
I'm ****ed either way.
Again now I have wasted three days of my vacation, which I really needed to
be not working given that I work normally 70 hours or more every week.
 
120 Gig WD drive, converted from FAT32 to NTFS and now everything (file/game
map loading) seems to take at least 20% longer.
Click to expand...

How did you convert? If you did it by using CONVERT C: /fs:NTFS, now
NTFS is almost certainly using 512-byte clusters, which is sub-optimal.
NTFS works more efficiently with 4k clusters.

Partition Tragic can convert the cluster sizes for you.
 
How did you convert? If you did it by using CONVERT C: /fs:NTFS, now
NTFS is almost certainly using 512-byte clusters, which is sub-optimal.
NTFS works more efficiently with 4k clusters.

Partition Tragic can convert the cluster sizes for you.
Click to expand...

Does anyone think that larger clusters will make the system perform
perceptably faster, or the OP happy ?

I still haven't seen a message stating that the OP has done a defrag
that includes the MFT and swap files. Until that happens I thing he's
just scrambling the disk up more and more. IMHO

Is there an authorative explanation of the effect of cluster sizes
in ntfs on the web ? I'd like to read it.
 
Al Dykes <[email protected]> said:
Does anyone think that larger clusters will make the system perform
perceptably faster, or the OP happy ?
Click to expand...

<shrug> I upgraded from Win98 to 2k, used convert.exe /fs:ntfs to
convert my FAT32 disk, and worked with 512-byte clusters for a while.
After reading about the alleged performance reduction, I used Partition
Tragic to re-size the clusters to 4k and then defragged. I do recall
that the first defrag after conversion took a long time to complete, but
don't recall that conversion made much difference to disk performance.
Is there an authorative explanation of the effect of cluster sizes
in ntfs on the web ? I'd like to read it.
Click to expand...

There's this wonderful tool called google, you know. :)

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=140365

http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBM/tip6400/rh6466.htm
 
<shrug> I upgraded from Win98 to 2k, used convert.exe /fs:ntfs to
convert my FAT32 disk, and worked with 512-byte clusters for a while.
After reading about the alleged performance reduction, I used Partition
Tragic to re-size the clusters to 4k and then defragged. I do recall
that the first defrag after conversion took a long time to complete, but
don't recall that conversion made much difference to disk performance.


There's this wonderful tool called google, you know. :)

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=140365

http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBM/tip6400/rh6466.htm
Click to expand...
I not inly defragged, but posted that I did so.
I also explained in aother thread that Drive Imgae should have just upsized
it's files from smaller drive so that I could use newly formatted NTFS @4k
clusters, but it won't.
Performance is 30% slower with 512 byte clusters and I have been "Googling"
for days on the subject.
I should not have to buy yet another garbage product to get the partitions
fixed that Drive Image ****ed up.
I can't even image to FAT32, which I'd be perfectly happy with right now.

In any event, I have read hundreds of posts that explain that 512 byte
clusters on a system are incredibly slow compared to 4k.
FAT32 was 8k.

I either need a fix for Drive Image or I need a fast way to convert the
clusters, but I prefer the latter to end up with new formatted NTFS drive.
 
Tom said:
I not inly defragged, but posted that I did so.
I also explained in aother thread that Drive Imgae should have just upsized
it's files from smaller drive so that I could use newly formatted NTFS @4k
clusters, but it won't.
Performance is 30% slower with 512 byte clusters and I have been "Googling"
for days on the subject.
I should not have to buy yet another garbage product to get the partitions
fixed that Drive Image ****ed up.
I can't even image to FAT32, which I'd be perfectly happy with right now.

In any event, I have read hundreds of posts that explain that 512 byte
clusters on a system are incredibly slow compared to 4k.
FAT32 was 8k.

I either need a fix for Drive Image or I need a fast way to convert the
clusters, but I prefer the latter to end up with new formatted NTFS drive.
Click to expand...

In your situation, I'd probably get a second drive and copy across
rather than trying to do everything in place. If you proceed as you
are, it's probably only a matter of time before you lose everything,
so I hope you have a good backup.

Perhaps you now have a better understanding why people like Unix and
Linux.
 
In your situation, I'd probably get a second drive and copy across
rather than trying to do everything in place. If you proceed as you
are, it's probably only a matter of time before you lose everything,
so I hope you have a good backup.

Perhaps you now have a better understanding why people like Unix and
Linux.
Click to expand...

One clear advantage of Drive Image (if it works the way it's supposed to),
is that it copies and images a 15 Gig partition in under 20 minutes.
It also moves the OS to avoid MS activation headaches.

When I try copying all the files, it takes four to five hours to copy one 14
Gig partition.

This make no sense at all, but it does because I tried it.
 
Well, my benchmarks show that even after defragmentation, NTFS is
almost 30% slower,
What fn bullshit is that.
Click to expand...

Did you do a boot-time defrag ? nothing else will fix your MFT and
swap space. The defrag that comes with XP won't do this.
 
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