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Technical Help & Discussion => General Tech Discussion, News & Q&A => Topic started by: Flanjeuk on October 26, 2004, 19:58

Title: FAT32 or NTFS?
Post by: Flanjeuk on October 26, 2004, 19:58

Which is better NTFS or FAT32, My current system is using NTFS, but I didn't set it up that way! What's the difference?

Title: Re:FAT32 or NTFS?
Post by: Hiatus on October 26, 2004, 20:19

Windows XP uses an NTFS partition. I don't know why actually...probably because it doesn't use MS DOS. All the older OS's use FAT32.

Someone here will know for sure what it all means...

Title: Re:FAT32 or NTFS?
Post by: Dack on October 26, 2004, 20:29

FAT32
- better for smaller drives (as cluster size starts getting very big - meaning you get situation where a 2 byte file takes up a 16k chunk of hard disc space
- no security so anyone with a boot floppy can read your files (unless extra software is installed)
- Max file size is about 4Gig

NTFS
- better for larger drives/partitions
- Has security capability in that you can restrict access to files/directories
- no max file size

However FAT32 easier to recover knackered file, as when NTFS goes......:)

Generally NTFS is better these days.