FAT32 or NTFS

[chrsfrm]

Just bought an Acer 1362WLMI laptop, has HDD partitioned into 3 x FAT32 partitions. Small 2gb for swap file I think, C: (18gb) for OS and Programs and D: (18gb) virtually empty called DATA.
Is this the best configuration? If so why? What are the benefits?
Should I convert to NTFS via convert command?
Thanx, Chris

[Darthtanion]

Re: FAT32 or NTFS

If you're going to be connecting to a network with other computers that use Win9x, stick with the FAT32 file system. Otherwise I generally recommend moving on to NTFS. It is a bit more secure and seems to be more intellegent about storing data on the drive. It is very stable and rarely fails on you. It has about the same performance level as FAT32 so there really isn't a reason not to utilize it unless other machines need to access your data and don't support this file system (hence the Win9x blurb above).

[chrsfrm]

Re: FAT32 or NTFS

Thanx Darth
Yes on home AOL network, other PC's on Win XP too, no older OS.
Chris

[tuxfreak]

Re: FAT32 or NTFS

If you're going to be connecting to a network with other computers that use Win9x, stick with the FAT32 file system.

When sharing accross a network filesystems are irrelevent, otherwise I would have a very hard time using a Linux file server on a Windows Domain :)

The only reason I would kept a FAT32 partition would be if I were going to mutli-boot with win9x and/or Linux where I wanted write support.

[Yawgm0th]

Re: FAT32 or NTFS

Just bought an Acer 1362WLMI laptop, has HDD partitioned into 3 x FAT32 partitions. Small 2gb for swap file I think, C: (18gb) for OS and Programs and D: (18gb) virtually empty called DATA.
Is this the best configuration? If so why? What are the benefits?
Should I convert to NTFS via convert command?
Thanx, Chris

A 2GB partition in FAT32 for the paging file makes sense if you have multiple hard drives, but it will hurt performance with a single drive. As for having multiple partitions, that makes sense for organizational purposes, but it's probably best to have them as NTFS.

[chrsfrm]

Re: FAT32 or NTFS

Thanx Guys, So Yawg.....should I convert the 2gb paging partition to NTFS too?

[Yawgm0th]

Re: FAT32 or NTFS

Up to you. At that size, there are some serious advantages to FAT32 with some of the major disadvantages removed. It's faster but won't have the size problems of FAT32 partitions larger than 2GB. It kind of depends what you're going to use it for, if anything...