[jwl812]

NTFS under XP is jackin' my system up!!!!!!!!! File access is incredibly slow. Programs take forever to start up. The harddisk is banging around constantly. FAT32 seemed much much faster. Also 3d framerates have suffered. Is NTFS better or just hype. It may be more secure but its definitly slower.

[Admiral LSD]

Yep, you do take a performance hit under NTFS but IMO it's well worth it. After being able to recover nearly all my files (only one wouldn't recover and that wasn't the fault of NTFS but rather the fact that WinTernals Disk Commander appears to have issues with filenames that have Unicode charatcters in them. Other programs would have recovered it just fine.) after a partition table meltdown (and possibly further damage to that area of the disk) I have utmost faith in NTFS ability to keep my data safe and as such will never even think about using FAT.

[Sampson]

Perhaps, it is time to defrag that hard drive.

[Admiral LSD]

Diskeeper is available for a 30-day trial:

http://www.executivesoftware.com/trialware/diskeeper/download.asp

It's not the best defragger in the world but since you only have like 2 other alternatives when it comes to NTFS defragmentation tools it not too bad.

[Dirty Harry]

OK, I'm a FAT32 fan and wouldn't put NTFS on any of my private systems, corporate stuff is another story. Still, I've never heard that NTFS would really give anyone a noticeable performance hit. It isn't faster, its slower, but it isn't really that much slower.

In short, I doubt that your trouble is because of NTFS, but unless you are running on big corporate networks, run huge files etc stay with FAT32.

H.

[CyberGenX]

NTFS is actually more robust than FAT32 and also FAT32 has the 4GIG file size limit as NTFS does not. I never saw any performance difference.

[Julian Mehnle]

O&O Defrag is the best defragger I have ever used. Diskeeper is shitty bloatware compared to it.

There's a trial version and even a freeware version (with less features though).

[DosFreak]

Try VoptNT/XP.

[Admiral LSD]

Quote:

O&O Defrag is the best defragger I have ever used. Diskeeper is shitty bloatware compared to it.

There's a trial version and even a freeware version (with less features though).

I tried O&O Defrag (the trial if that means anything) once and it sucked. Nearly every NTFS defragger sucks in one way or another. What I want is a program that works like Nortons Speed Disk (the 9x version, the NT version sucked balls).

And Dirty Harry: How can you trust your data to a Filesystem that was originally designed for floppy disks? You only have to look sideways at a FAT volume to generate half a dozen lost chains and goodness knows what else.

[Champion_R]

I've lost files on FAT32 before. I changed to NTFS and had no probs since. I also have a mate who lost a Diablo II character using FAT32. Boy was he pissed, He uses NTFS now.

[Julian Mehnle]

Quote:

What I want is a program that works like Nortons Speed Disk (the 9x version, the NT version sucked balls).

What do you mean, i.e. what features are you missing?

[hardtofin]

correct me if im wong. but i think once u get over the 4gig that is fat32's limit. ntfs claws back its performance and is actually fater than fat32. im a hardcore win2k pro man with ALL ntfs partitions. i hate 9x and anything to do with it. and hence avoid it like the plague. i thought only noobs used fat32 still.

hardtofin

[Julian Mehnle]

Quote:

correct me if im wong. but i think once u get over the 4gig that is fat32's limit.

You can create partitions much larger than 4GB with FAT32 without noticable performance degradation. The problem with FAT32 is that it can't handle files larger than 4GB at all. NTFS can.

[Brian Frank]

From my experience, NTFS vs. FAT32 isn't noticeable. I used to run all FAT32 drives when I started using Win2k. I slowly migrated to NTFS on all of my partitions, and I cannot tell you the speed difference for the life of me. Benchmarks may say one thing--and while they are neat to compare, they don't tell you if you'll notice the difference, and in most cases you don't. NTFS is better than FAT32 by a long shot. The only time you really even need FAT32 on an NT-based system is if you're doing a dual-boot with any OS that doesn't read NTFS (Win9x, older distros of Linux--so I'm told anyway).

[Admiral LSD]

Linux still only has read-only support for NTFS. Write support is still coming (it's been that way for something like 3 years...), or so I believe.

I've been using NTFS for all my NT partitions ever since I started using NT over 3 years ago. I saw no logical reason to use anything other than an OS's native filesystem (many of these habits were migrated from Linux, including my mania for less-than-Admin user accounts). It meant my partitioning scheme had to be a little funky but I wouldn't have it any other way.

I think I used FAT32 under Win2k once, when I first got hold of it. I installed it on the same partition as my existing Win98 installation (bad move) after removing my NT4 partition and resizing the Win98 one. After spending lots of time trying to figure out why I could suddenly access other users files (and subsequently trying to figure out where the Permissions options had disappeared to) I came to the realisation that permissions were a native feature of NTFS (with no provision being provided to emulate them on FAT32 partitions).

A few weeks later I bought a brand spanking new 20Gb Seagate Barracuda HDD (which failed within 6 months but was quickly replaced and it's replacement is still going strong today since I don't have the money to replace it) and installed Win2k on to its own dedicated 17Gb NTFS partition (with 98 and a seperate partition for the swap file installed on the remaining 2, formatted as FAT32 and FAT16 respectively). I haven't used FAT under an NT OS since and have no intent to do so ever again. FAT is dead as far as I'm concerned and I hope M$ kill it off along with Win9x.

[Julian Mehnle]

Admiral LSD, you're taking your words out of my mouth!

[CyberGenX]

So in summary boys and girls:

1. FAT32 has a file size limit of 4 gigabytes.
2. FAT32 has NO security.
3. FAT32 is not 100% stable.
4. FAT32 is only good for 9.x and dual boot environments.
5. NTFS kicks total @ss!!!
5. If you run FAT32 on NT you need to switch.

[GTwannabe]

Yes, NTFS kicks butt. It uses a binary search method that can find basically any file in 7 tries max.

There are several tweaks you can do to disable the logging features of NTFS to make it quicker, but it's plenty quick as it is.

[CUViper]

Quote:

It uses a binary search method that can find basically any file in 7 tries max.

Huh? I'm not sure I follow your logic here... the only way a binary search could have a MAX of seven attempts would be if there were no more than 128 (=2^7) objects to look through...

[lumpy]

Diskeeper and Vopt are slow compared to O&O.