Ask Root: NTFS vs. FAT32

splendedwarrior Asks:

What are the differences and similarities between FAT32 and NTFS filesystems, and what situations are better for each?

 

root:

A great question that doesn't get asked often. Many people don't think about the filesystem. For those who don't know what a filesystem is, it's pretty much a lookup directory for all your files (think of a phone book, numbers/names being your data/locations). NTFS was Microsoft's response to FAT32's limitations. Did they succeed? You betcha. Here is a quick comparison of NTFS over FAT32: http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm (Note, second and third column is NTFS and FAT32)

So when would you ever use FAT32? NTFS isn't supported by all Operating Systems (OS) so you will sometimes be forced to use it. From a strictly performance standpoint, as you can see in the comparison chart, FAT32 is better than NTFS in smaller volumes. What does "volumes" mean? Partitions. But the key words here is 'strictly performance standpoint'. NTFS has many features that aren't on FAT32, like journaling and compression. Overall, NTFS is more resilient and harder to corrupt than FAT32. Here is a great FAQ article: http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?...d1

 

Other reading materials:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_optimization.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystems
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/n/ntfs/ntfs4-1.html 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

 

PROACEX1: 

Hmm, I think NTFS5 instead of NTFS, thanks to a few more technical abilities...The former, for example, allows for encryption, while the later doesn't...FAT32 overall I've never liked too much...Good to great speed on small files, but being a power user, I mainly work with large files anyhow...Also, FAT32 compared too NTFS causes more blue screens, data loss, and other issues I don't like...Minor annoyances, but still, not good...

However, since it is just between NTFS and FAT32, I'd have to go with: NTFS, due to better speed with large files and for a better fault tolerance...Also, the overall abilities of NTFS blow FAT32 outta the water...Of course, as you said, there are many OS's which don't support NTFS or NTFS5, which is a downside...Other than a few Window's OS's, Mac OS X, and a few Linux OS's, and a few other OS's, NTFS isn't available...Details needed to ensure compatibility with NTFS (on the implementation's internals) are closed, so third-party vendors have a difficult time providing tools to handle NTFS...Which is mostl likely the reason why most OS's don't have compatability with NTFS, especially free-ware OS's, such as Linux...

Another downside to FAT32 is that, unlike NTFS even, FAT32 doesn't always have a 2 Terabyte limit like all NTFS OS's do...So FAT32 can also be a limiting factor when it comes too storage...

64-Bit OS's have some pretty good upsides, being able to normally support NTFS...

Respectfully,

PROACEX1

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