FAT32 and NTFS question

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pdlstl

pdlstl

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My older, surfing computer (not my DAW) is running Win XP Pro and I have a 60 GB internal HD and an external 80 GB Firewire HD.

Yesterday, I picked up another 160 GB external Firewire/USB2.0 drive to get some breathing room on the original 2 drives.

Well, the new drive needed to be formatted so I did it through Administrative Tools>Disk Management. When it asked to select the file system for the new drive, the drop-down menu only offered one choice, NTFS.

So, now I have 2 drives formatted for FAT32 and the new drive which is NTFS.

Everything seems to work just fine but I'm concerned that I may have problems at a later date.

Do I need to do something about this or am I concerned about nothing?

Thanks,

Earl
 
No you shouldnt have any problems. Its best though if you use NTFS for all your drives anyway.

Its really simple to convert your drives to NTFS at any time. Just make sure you run through scandisk and everything to make sure there are no errors on the harddrive.

Just go into the command prompt and type this command in.

convert (drive_letter): /fs:ntfs

So example.

convert c: /fs:ntfs


Windows might need to restart after that and it might need to do a thing before windows starts. But its really simple and doesnt take to long to do.

danny
 
No biggie. XP relates to both at the same time just fine, at least from my experience
 
Danny,

Thanks for the quick response! Takes a load off my mind.

Earl
 
Shouldn't be an issue. Why did you go with FAT32 to begin with??
 
FAT32 was the way the computer came (new in late 2001)...I think. :confused:

Earl
 
i think FAT32 is still better for older OS's and generally better at handling volumes of smaller size. for XP NTFS is the format of choice.
 
I have a 120GB Barracuda paritioned 30GB FAT and 90GB NTFS.

The reason I did that was I was having issues cloning the 30GB to another drive using Ghost when it was NTFS.

Both formats live happily together on the same drive
 
Bulls Hit said:
I have a 120GB Barracuda paritioned 30GB FAT and 90GB NTFS.

The reason I did that was I was having issues cloning the 30GB to another drive using Ghost when it was NTFS.
Click to expand...

Had a similar problem till I realized MS has slightly modded NTFS since win2000. Makes older versions of Ghost pissy. Once I got a new version I had no problems ghosting the newer ntfs....
 
I posted a like question not long ago.

Here is my thought. At one time it was common to format fat32 whenever you knew you were going to be writing large files. This was true for large photos, music, CAD files and such.

Now it appears that there is less of a difference in performance.

However, note that some software manufacturers still recommend FAT32.

Cakewalk/Sonar is one of them. I just heard from tech support at cake and they said, given a choice, that I should choose FAT32 for any disks I plan to write my audio to.

They note that either will work, but FAT32 is preferred.

Jim
 
Can you transfer files back and forth between Mac and PC with NTFS? I have a feeling you can't. For that reason I've been formatting my external drives with FAT32. That's really the only reason I can think of nowadays not to use NTFS.
 
Another reason is that Linux has no (stable) write support to NTFS partitions. You can read NTFS partitions in Linux, however.
 
Isn't there a limit to how big you can make a FAT32 partition?
Like 32GB or something
 
FAT32 can partition up to 2 TB. The largest I've personally formatted for was 120 GB. The maximum file size for FAT32 is 4GB though, which makes NTFS a better choice for video editing, but you probably won't ever have that big of a file working with music stuff.
FAT32 is also a tiny bit faster but I think it's not a significant increase in performance to make it a deciding factor when formatting a drive. I prefer FAT32 since I run a dual boot, and it's less of a hassle fixing XP when it goes belly up. You can use a win98 boot disk to get in and see your stuff.
 
Right so when you're formatting a drive for audio use, should you go for bigger block/cluster sizes or smaller. I'd imagine as you're streaming large audio files, a bigger block size would be better?
 
Reading up on it. Seems like on other message boards people think larger clusters improve performance, but no one's really sure why...
From what I'm reading, I guess the reason to increase the cluster size is mainly the reduction in fragmentation, and more performance since the computer reads a smaller quantity of clusters. Not sure what that means, but I'd think CPU time the IDE causes and disk access latency could be a couple reasons. The draw back to larger cluster sizes is the slack at the end of a cluster. If you formatted with 32k clusters and you had tons of tiny little files you'd be wasting a ton of disk space. Not a concern on a music data drive where most of the stuff is in the MBytes...
 
Yeh makes sense.

If you're accessing a whole lot of little 1K records or files randomly, then a smaller 4K cluster size would be better because there's not too much excess data being moved around unnecessarily. But for audio where large contiguous areas of data are being accessed, then a larger cluster makes more sense as you can read more data with fewer physical I/Os
 
Even the smallest audio file will be pretty huge (hundreds of k) so it's not much waste if you're using big clusters. However, with today's ripping fast computers and drives, I think you're safe going with whatever the default drive cluster size. The last time I had a performance issue related to hard drive cluster size (at 24+ tracks) was on an ancient PII.
 
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