Consider the Cluster : Choosing between FAT & NTFS

[mycrisoft]

Do you know what file system your hard drive uses? Most people pay little attention to it, even though it is one of the most important factors regarding everything from driver performance to overall storage capacity. If you use the original version of Windows 95, you are forced to use the ancient FAT16 (16 bit like allocation table) technology, but Win95 OSR2 (original equipment manufacturer Service Release 2) introduced the much more capable FAT32 (32-bit FAT) and Windows NT came with the advanced NTFS (New Technology File System). All Windows OSes (operating systems) since Win95 OSR2 can use one or both of these advanced file systems, so it helps to know their strengths and weaknesses.

FAT32
The FAT32 file system is by far the most popular one used in Microsoft’s consumer OSes as it offers arguably the best combination of performance and compatibility. The file system is beginning to show its age, and its limits are pushed by today’s high-capacity hard drives. Although FAT32 is theoretically compatible with drives as big as 2TB (terabytes, or trillions of bytes) in capacity, it uses inefficient 32KB clusters when applied to partitions larger than 32GB. That means a 4KB file takes up a minimum of 32KB on such a drive, leaving 28KB of unusable slack space. Dropping the partition size to between 16GB and 32GB reduces the cluster size to a more efficient 16KB, and creating partitions between 8GB and 16GB yields 8KB clusters. Because you want to shoot for the 8KB or 16KB clusters, you need to chop up a large hard drive into several logical drives in order to obtain optimal efficiency, and not everyone wants to doubt that.
FAT32 does not offer many extra features beyond providing a basic file system for the operating system, but nearly any operating system can use it, including Win95 OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows ME, and Windows XP, Win95, DOS, and Windows NT are out of the picture, but so few consumers use those operating systems today that it really isn’t an issue.

NTFS
Power users with OSes that can use NTFS, such as WinNT or WinXP, might want to consider it simply because of the numerous advanced features it offers. For one thing, NTFS offers built-in data compression, so users can compress and decompress NTFS files on the fly without using third-party utilities. The other benefit to this integrated compression vs. the older DriveSpace and DoubleSpace tools older versions of Windows use is that NTFS compression makes it possible to compress individual files, folders, or entire drives as the need arises. DriveSpace and DoubleSpace forced users to compress entire partitions if they wanted to benefit from data compression. This hurts overall system performance immensely because Windows must decompress and then recompress every bit of data each time a user accesses it. NTFS also offers integrated data encryption, letting users easily secure files without needing to rely on a third-party program. The basic structure of NTFS is also far superior to that of FAT32, making the file system better suited to handling large hard drives or partitions.