NTFS or FAT32

judder · 15 Jan 2008 at 10:33

Could somebody please tell me the difference between FAT32 and NTFS formats? My computer's HD is partitioned with the 2/3 of the total space being NTFS and the rest, FAT32. Is there a good reason for this? Cheers.

rpstewart · 15 Jan 2008 at 11:15

FAT(32)
NTFS

The only reason for using FAT32 is to allow an OS which can't read NTFS (Win9x, MacOS, Linux(?) ) access the disk. This is only valid if the drive is directly attached to the machine using that OS - if the drive is shared over the LAN then the filesystem is irrelevant.

judder · 15 Jan 2008 at 11:38

Thanks for that. That makes sense as I have both XP and Linux installed. I assume that XP is happy with both types (I can certainly read and write with XP to both drives anyway). Cheers.

Jumping · 15 Jan 2008 at 13:53

Linux can read ntfs for sure, I think these days it can probably write to ntfs too.

helmutcheese · 15 Jan 2008 at 13:56

FAT32 is old hat and cant handle bigger files, also not as stable as NTFS.

" The maximum possible file size for a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 byte (232-1 bytes) "

badbob · 15 Jan 2008 at 14:02

FAT32 slows down too, once it starts filling up. Unless you need to access the files across multiple operating systems, use NTFS. And if you do have several computers (Linux, Microsoft and Apple) have a NAS or a file server as that's indepedant of the OS on your computer.

Phil2008 · 15 Jan 2008 at 15:15

Whats the reason for the 4gb max file size with fat32?

helmutcheese · 15 Jan 2008 at 15:20

Who knows, same as a length of certain material of rope can only lift X weight before it snaps.

Its just the way it is.

wolvers · 15 Jan 2008 at 15:33

helmutcheese said:
FAT32 is old hat and cant handle bigger files, also not as stable as NTFS.

" The maximum possible file size for a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 byte (232-1 bytes) "

It is possible to format a drive up to 2TB in FAT32 if you use 'fat32format'.

ByteJuggler · 15 Jan 2008 at 15:41

Jumping said:
Linux can read ntfs for sure, I think these days it can probably write to ntfs too.

It can.

ByteJuggler · 15 Jan 2008 at 15:43

speedy2004 said:
Whats the reason for the 4gb max file size with fat32?

Random guess (not having checked): They use a 32-bit integer (fixed 4 bytes) in the filesystem to store a file's size, thereby limiting the maximum size a file may have recorded against it as 4GB.

ByteJuggler · 15 Jan 2008 at 15:43

wolvers69 said:
It is possible to format a drive up to 2TB in FAT32 if you use 'fat32format'.

Yeah, he was talking about the maximum size a file on the filesystem may have, not the maximum size the partition may have.

ByteJuggler · 15 Jan 2008 at 15:46

Aside: On very large drives (which is about any drive these days from FAT32's point of view), FAT32's cluster size gets to be ridiculously large, causing the filesystem to be highly inefficient with space usage when storing a lot of little files. NTFS is a lot better in this regard. Hence if you're storing very large files, the large cluster size doesn't matter, but if you're storing very many small files, you'll be wasting a lot of diskspace by using FAT32, and you should rather go for NTFS in that case.

helmutcheese · 15 Jan 2008 at 16:05

ByteJuggler said:
Yeah, he was talking about the maximum size a file on the filesystem may have, not the maximum size the partition may have.

Correct m8.

" In Windows XP, the maximum partition size that can be created using FAT32 is 32GB. This increases to 16TB (terabytes) using NTFS"

There is a workaround to the above though.

I bought my 1st PC in 2001 from Evesham (total nightmare from day 1) and it has Win ME on 1 big 60GB Partition/HDD now I know why it was so unstable esp with Win ME lol.

Boah · 15 Jan 2008 at 21:06

The only reason for using FAT32 is to allow an OS which can't read NTFS (Win9x, MacOS, Linux(?) )

Mac OS X can read NTFS partitions out of the box (I think from 10.3, but certainly 10.4 and 10.5), but to be able to write to them you need install MacFUSE, which is a Mac implementation of FUSE.

Phil2008 · 15 Jan 2008 at 22:20

God I would hate to go back to win98/winme, You had to reboot after a few hours cos the OS would get so slow, and win98/winme crashed loads too

Jumping · 16 Jan 2008 at 09:39

speedy2004 said:
God I would hate to go back to win98/winme, You had to reboot after a few hours cos the OS would get so slow, and win98/winme crashed loads too

It wasn't that bad if you didn't have a system full of rubbish...

wolvers · 16 Jan 2008 at 10:29

ByteJuggler said:
Yeah, he was talking about the maximum size a file on the filesystem may have, not the maximum size the partition may have.

I stand corrected!