Format external HD - FAT32 or NTFS?

anti-banausic · Post by **anti-banausic** » Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:10 am

I think the subject says it all. I just bought a Lacie 160 GB D2 HDD and I need to format to back-up so that I can re-install OS.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
AB

Moody · Post by **Moody** » Wed Dec 29, 2004 3:42 am

I did mine NTFS. I can see no reason to do it FAT32. NTFS is the native format for XP and probably will be until WinFS arrives.

Have Fun!

FaX-01 · Post by **FaX-01** » Wed Dec 29, 2004 6:02 am

anti-banausic wrote:I think the subject says it all. I just bought a Lacie 160 GB D2 HDD and I need to format to back-up so that I can re-install OS.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
AB

NTFS definately same External Drive - FAT32 wont support a full 160 drive anyway unless it has 3 80 gig partitions on PC ........
And yes NTFS is NATIVE XP format.

Moonburnt · Post by **Moonburnt** » Wed Dec 29, 2004 11:48 am

XP SP1 or higher can handle fat32 volumes larger than 137GB, which is the largest than can be accessed reliably by previous OSes. I currently have 2 FAT32 160GB drives and a 120GB (all unpartitioned) running fine under WinXP SP1.

There are definitely plenty of advantages to NTFS, but since 9/10 people will recommend NTFS, I don't really need to add to that, I'll just tell you what I like about FAT32 to give the other side of the coin...

It's a universal format, so i can connect my USB2 caddy to my friend's G5 no sweat, whereas OSX can't write to NTFS volumes.

It's readable by Win98 & DOS, so when things go wrong or if I want to do anything sneaky behind WinXP's back, the hard drive is still accessible. This has saved my ass on more than one occasion.

NTFS was designed with network security in mind, and I have no need for any of the indexing/privacy features it offers. Some say that the performance of NTFS suffers because of this, I don't know if that's really true. What is true is that with fat32, there's no way that permission errors will ever mess up your system or lock you out of your own OS.

You can convert fat32 to ntfs later but not vice versa

Regardless of file system, for a really good *free* formatting & partitioning program go to seagate.com and get "discwizard starter edition" - runs from a bootable cd (or floppy) and allows you to format beyond the limitations of either windows of fdisk.

iAmMick · Post by **iAmMick** » Wed Dec 29, 2004 2:51 pm

if you do video, use NTFS. FAT32 has a 4 gb limit.

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Wed Dec 29, 2004 5:34 pm

Moonburnt wrote: You can convert fat32 to ntfs later but not vice versa

actually with Partition Magic 8.0 you can convert NTFS to FAT32 without loss of data. and i remember the original Final Scratch 1.0 for embedded Linux came with a utility to convert NTFS to FAT32 without data loss as it required your system and data partitions for Final Scratch to be FAT32.

as far as why i would use FAT32 ? , only if i wanted to share the data on the HD with a Macintosh as well, but thats what network cables are for

Format external HD - FAT32 or NTFS?

Format external HD - FAT32 or NTFS?

Re: Format external HD - FAT32 or NTFS?

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