Best File System (NTFS or FAT32) for USB External Hard Drive

[nuzzawuzza]

Posted: Wed Oct 16, 2002 10:43 am Post subject: Best File System (NTFS or FAT32) for USB External Hard Drive

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I just bought a Maxtor 5000LE that has 80GB storage capacity and uses USB 1.1/.20 to connect to the PC. It comes formatted with FAT32. I will be storing large .avi files on this (around 700MB each) and wanted to know what would be the best file systems as far as disk storage and performance. I imagine with USB 1.1 or even 2.0 the performance will be poor anyhow. But in terms of making the most out of the 80GB I have to work with is NTFS or FAT32 better? I don't care about file system security and I am not sure if compression would be helpful in this case. Thanks in advance for any feedback you can provide.

 

[paparazi]

As I understand it NTFS is a newer and more stable file system, I don't think the answer is any differant for external drives not having had any experiences with them.
Martin Please let members know if there advice has helped any.

 

[Snickle]

Last first: drive compression won't happen on FAT32 partitions. It probably won't work on NTFS-formatted partitions with larger than 4KB clusters either.

WinXP can't create partitions larger than 32GB but will work with them just fine, probably why the FAT32 formatting when you got the drive. And any software that came with the drive may be a limiting factor.

As far as the files themselves go, only the last portion of any file that does not completely file a cluster will have slack space in it. Example, my empty Recycled folder on WinXP Pro FAT32 shows a size of 85 Bytes but is occupying 32,768 Bytes [32KB] of space on the hard drive, so it has 32,683 Bytes of slack/wasted space.

USB 1.1 has a performance of 12Mbps but USB 2.0 can reach as high as 480Mbps, quite a difference in transfer speed.

 

[TyrantSSV]

nuzzawuzza
If this device uses USB to connect to the PC it is the mobile device, isn't it? This mean you may want to store data on it and connect it to another computer. If you will use NTFS what you will do if that another computer haven't NTFS?
But if you don't planning to use this device for data transfer between some computers or all these computers have USB and NTFS, use NTFS besause it is more reliable file system.

 

[thatrenowned]

Take a look at

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/...oc/en/choosing_between_NTFS_FAT_and_FAT32.asp

Just a note on the Windows XP FAT32 maximum 32gb partition thing, I've got Windows XP Pro running FAT32 on a 40gb partition (well, closer to 37gb actually). I upgraded from Windows 98 so that might be the reason....