NTFS Performance

[Alien 1]

All I know is that on 9x SD was fast & had more power to do its job the way you wanted it to, whereas the 2K/XP v. is like a prog written for 95, just after 95 was released, by someone who had gotten their 1st computer only 6 months before!!!

[Uykucu 0]

All that discussion in one day only...

Gee, i am glad we are not face to face sometimes since we can't get anything done (workwise) apart from arguing.

 

Clutch already explained the reasons and all. All i am going to say/ ask is

When are people are going to believe in benchmarks??? Fat32 might be faster so what? How fast? 10%? 20%? we are talking about ms'nds here so even a hundred procent is not going to mean jack.

 

Security and reliability negates any real or imaginary advantage of Fat32. And if you are using computers as servers, mainframes etc instead of games you really don't have an alternative to NTFS in my opinion.

[Alien 1]

AlecStaar - have you actually used SD under 9x or ME? I ask because I'm not comparing SD to any other prog, I'm comparing SD to SD. Under 9x/ME it's a really good defragger, under 2K/XP there's precious little to raise it above the rest. If you have access to a 9x/ME machine try SD on there, take a look @ the extra options there are & what it can do, & then see how fast it is.

 

This isn't an NTFS vs. FAT32 issue, as I used FAT32 on 9x & still do on XP.

 

When you've seen SD under 9x/ME you'll realise that the 2K/XP v. has less features/abilities & is slower than the 9x/ME version

[DosFreak 2]

Backups are a MUST but they only go so far.

 

I have 50GB of data that I backup monthly or after I make alot of changes. This 50GB must be stored on my HD because I re-organize it constantly. If I used FAT32 I would have to use 2 partitions because FAT32 does not support parititions of that size. Now, a constant worry with me is corruption of files. You see...I do ALOT of messing around with my machine because I like to learn. I have not had time to build my second machine yet (gonna be my file-server) so currently these files are on my main machine. Now occasionally when overclocking and reaching the limits of the PCI bus errors are introduced into NTFS...I've lost a couple of files this way. (Now that I'm using an Athlon, instead of a P3 I no longer have to go to extremes in overclocking so I do not experience this anymore). With FAT32 I can guarandamteea that I would have lost it all....and I have.

 

My current backup solution is 2 100GB HD's. 1 HD for uncompressed files that I add to and reorganize. The second HD I backup to monthly (or after changes). The backup file is 50GB which cannot fit onto a FAT32 partition. FAT32 also cannot put security on my backup file...so let's say I'm connecting to my friend over the network and I'm using FAT32. Well if I didn't have a firewall he could just perform a simple \\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\I$ (if the share is not turned off) and delete all of my files. With NTFS I can keep my shares, assign security to them and also to my files.

 

 

Generally the higher the cluster size the greater the speed but also a greater waste of HD space. FAT32 has a higher cluster size than NTFS does by default. IIRC, FAT32 is 32kb and NTFS is 4kb. The speed decrease your noticing is probably because of that fact.

 

You can use FAT on your NT OS partition but anyone who does is putting themselves and everyone else at risk. I absolutely hate it when people make decisions and then only think these decisions affect themselves. We are all connected people. Your machine is not your machine when it's being used as a way station to attack on MY machine.

 

 

I really do not know why this thread was posted. If you cannot surf to microsoft.com/technet yourself and look up a couple of KB articles and decide which filesystem is better for you than perhaps you deserve what you will eventually get out of using an "inferior" filesystem. It's all right there in the KB.

 

 

 

Quote:

If you honestly ever suspect having a "hard disk meltdown", wouldn't you rather rely on a complete backup to CD or tape, anyway, to restore everything? I mean, you can do that in either FAT32 or NTFS.

 

I can't see that, just because you formatted to NTFS, rather than FAT32, you're going to prevent a faulty hard disk from completely screwing up. Okay, for lesser problems, where it's not actually the HD that's at fault but, more, some aspect of the OS, I could perhaps believe that NTFS will recover the situation better. But, as I said earlier, I've been running Win2K on FAT32 to date and, on the very infrequent occasions when something HAS gone wrong, Windows has always recovered.

 

Please, please. Someone, convince me that I'm not going to suffer a hikedown in speed if I go to NTFS.With obvious overheads, it certainly looks as though I am.

 

(Incidentally, I notice that, under Win2K's Disk management, you can format in either FAT32 or NTFS, and cluster size anything from 512b to 8KB, but I think that, in practice, Windows prefers to use the default setting and adjusts things itself, according to the size of the partition).

[Alien 1]

Other half??? You couldn't get me to go back to 9x for love nor money, I'm an XP "fanboy" too, but I used 9x for a long time.

 

As for Speed Disk, under XP it can't defrag the swap file. There are some defraggers out there that can do it with a reboot, but the 9x v. of SD used to do it whilst Windows was running. Also, haven't you noticed all those little yellow blobs on the Optimization Map scattered all over the place? Those are foiders - under 9x you could have them all sorted into 1 contiguous block, rather than here, there & everywhere. The option to do that in the XP v. seems to be missing. I think there were 1 or 2 other things as well, but I've forgotten as it's been so long since I switched to XP.

 

It was also noticeably faster under 9x.