Gabe Posted February 5, 2002 Share Posted February 5, 2002 When I install windows xp on my 40gig western digital hdd the only option I have when choosing format and file system is NTFS. I do get Fat32 on a smaller drive, anyone know why? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dudlington Posted February 5, 2002 Share Posted February 5, 2002 I had the same thing on my 40gig and my 60gig. I used Fdisk/WinME boot disc to format it as fat32 and then installed WinXP. Don't know why WinXP setup doesn't give you the option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PM5K Posted February 5, 2002 Share Posted February 5, 2002 Limit is 32gb, and I don't know why you'd want to use FAT32. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bangbang023 Veteran Posted February 5, 2002 Veteran Share Posted February 5, 2002 While Fat32 is a tad bit faster, NTFS is much better especially for larger drives like that. I may only have a 20gb drive, but I noticed almost no performance drop at all after converting to NTFS and after defragging. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven Posted February 5, 2002 Share Posted February 5, 2002 When Using Setup, Drives or Partitions Set Larger than 32GB will be only availble for NTFS, NTFS is much better than fat32 in any case, big or small. This is not new, this is a windows 2000 policy as well as windows xp. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David123987 Posted February 6, 2002 Share Posted February 6, 2002 Thanks for the info, i've been wondering about that myself.;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dudlington Posted February 6, 2002 Share Posted February 6, 2002 yeah, I converted both drives to NTFS now, and the only real difference I notice is that it takes a lot longer for all the background programs to load at startup. So I guess it is noticably slower than FAT32 :( , although in most games it doesn't really seem to matter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JustinLerner Posted February 7, 2002 Share Posted February 7, 2002 In my experience, NTFS (all versions from NT4.0) have been faster than FAT32. When you use NTFS, Win 2000/XP can enable and attempt to start different services (security) that are not enabled and started when you don't use NTFS. This is the primary reason for slower loading, but in reality NTFS is actually FASTER than FAT32. OF course the other benefit is better security, a more stable file system (one that is resilient compared to FAT32), etc Run benchmarks and you will see the difference. Go to ZiffDavis/ZDnet and download their benchmarks and see the difference yourself. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dudlington Posted February 7, 2002 Share Posted February 7, 2002 Do you know which services are started when you use NTFS? Are they all necessary or can some of them be disabled to gain some startup speed? Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neowin_hipster Posted February 8, 2002 Share Posted February 8, 2002 NTFS has a hard time fragging. I tried my ass of to see if I could get it to frag. Only 8% though :( ;) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PM5K Posted February 8, 2002 Share Posted February 8, 2002 Originally posted by Goalie_CA NTFS has a hard time fragging. I tried my ass of to see if I could get it to frag. Only 8% though :( ;) It's not NTFS, it's your drive that's the problem, or more likely certain settings that keep it from finishing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Roger H. Veteran Posted February 8, 2002 Veteran Share Posted February 8, 2002 hey Mr. Smartpants! That's not the problem.. what he stated he meant that NTFS is good cuz he was purposely trying to get his drive fragmented and it was only 8% when he was done. Prolly with 98 or any drive on Fat32 it would be fragmented like hell. The last time i checked my fat32 partition on my main system it was at 80% defragmented!! The NTFS one was only 4% so that means NTFS is good for that kinda stuff which is a good thing! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PM5K Posted February 8, 2002 Share Posted February 8, 2002 Now that I read it again I guess you are right, no idea why he put a sad face, if you want alot of fragmentation go back to FAT32 ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Firebird Posted February 8, 2002 Share Posted February 8, 2002 in my experience fat32 is much faster than ntfs on my 1.05gb 512mbram Athlon, with a seagate 20gig and quantum 20 gig on udma4. i use diskeeper 7 to keep it defragged i liked the extra features and security of ntfs but its lack of performance was rather noticeable at present i have 0% fragmented files Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jwndw Posted February 11, 2002 Share Posted February 11, 2002 If anyone here is running XP and has a motherboard with an integrated Highpoint Raid controller, I will bet you 2 things. 90% of you are running Fat32 and the other 10% are still trying to figure out why NTFS is so slow on the Highpoint Controller. I wanted so badly to use NTFS, but my benchmark scores were so pathetically low and boot times so incredibly slow, I could not tolerate it. I tried HD Tach, Sandra, and the ZiffDavis benchmark, all with the same conclusion. NTFS and the highpoint controller do not play well together in XP. The highest score I ever got with Sandra was 24600, barely faster than a single drive. Switched back to Fat32 and my system boots 35 seconds faster and my disk scores are back up to 38-40000. I for one can certainly see why some people would not want to use NTFS. I will never use it as long as the performance is so poor on my machine. I used NTFS on my old computer with Win2K and I liked it. It did seem to respond faster and you could run it for months without defragging. I used an add in FastTrak66 raid controller card with my old setup and it scored around 33-34000 in Sandra, which isn't too bad I guess since it was only Ultra 66. I don't think its NTFS in my case, but Highpoint refusing to get off their @ss and make a decent Bios and driver set for Win XP. If they ever did, I would switch. Just my 2 cents worth.......:alien: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Laughing-Man Posted February 11, 2002 Share Posted February 11, 2002 NTFS all the way! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YahoKa Posted February 11, 2002 Share Posted February 11, 2002 NTFS has a smaller cluster size too, doesnt it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steven Posted February 11, 2002 Share Posted February 11, 2002 NTFS is sweet, it keeps all of your smaller files in its MFT, and for safety reasons, if your system shutsdown irratically or you have like a failure, it'll roll back the drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts