I know this has been asked a million times before, but I'll ask it again, in case there is any new insight into the topic.

I just got a large external HD. What advantages and disadvantages are there in formatting FAT32 or NTFS?

Also, is there any advantage these days into partitioning a larger drive into smaller partitions, vs. keeping it as one large partition?

Thank you for your insight.

One advantage FAT32 has is that if your partition gets corrupted you at least stand some kind of a chance of recovering the data.
With NTFS your chances are very slim.
Of course, FAT32 is a time bomb with it's file allocation table layout etc and NTFS is not supposed to corrupt itself...
Of course it doesn't actually work that way in real life.
Partitioning a drive allows for easier backup.
NTFS has a little command overhead to it but with today's disk drives it doesn't matter like it used to.
NTFS allows for larger file sizes.

etc.....
There is no real reason to use FAT32 anymore.

Bottom line.......NTFS FTW.

I used an external HD to transfer all my files from my old Win98 PC to a new XP machine back in 2005. I had to format the ext. drive to FAT32 prior to doing this so it would accept data from Win98. After then transferring the data from the ext. drive to the NTFS drive on the XP machine, I decided to keep the data that was on the ext. drive as a backup. I've since kept adding to it over time to back up important stuff.

I would now like to reformat it to NTFS (mainly because of the 4gb filesize limitation of FAT32) and I've read more than a few articles saying this can be done without losing or damaging the data already on the drive. It still makes me a little nervous, though. The drive's 2/3rds full and I don't have room on either internal drive to make a safety copy just in case something goes wrong.

Has anyone actually done this (reformatted a FAT32 drive full of data to NTFS without corrupting or losing any of the pre-existing data)?

ORIGINAL: pjfarr

Has anyone actually done this (reformatted a FAT32 drive full of data to NTFS without corrupting or losing any of the pre-existing data)?

I've done it twice, many years ago :) Always worked like a charm, no data was lost both times. Just make sure you won't have a power-outage or such while converting, severing the process before completion can be fatal.

FAT32 vs NTFS - no doubt about it, NTFS is tons better and a lot more reliable. And as for partitioning - in my experience, partitioning is the absolute WORST thing you can do to your drive short of dropping it from your 2nd floor window. When you divide a drive up you effectively halve it's performance when both drives need to be accessed at the same time, as the same set of heads will be used to read from both "drives"; but even worse, you lose the ability to perform a dynamic defragmentation (which can be a huge performance booster). See, any hard drive can access the clusters that are closer to the disc's center faster than it can access the outer clusters, and with dynamic defragmentation apps like "Ultimate Defrag" you can optimize your drive for performance to move files that you need higher performance on to the inner part of the disk (you can even configure it to move a whole folder to a high-performance area, I routinely use that feature to keep my virtual intruments' sample data and sonar project folder on the inner tracks). All those advantages are lost when using a partitioned drive, you will end up with one drive that is always slow by default, and the access times for the fast drive will be hurt by partitioning as well.
If you just want another drive letter, then mount an NTFS folder as a drive using windows' disk management control panel; you'll have another virtual drive, with no need to partition anything.

I recently started working with videos and audio and files more than 4 gb is becoming more and more common. I had to convert over to NTFS after witnessing failed file transfres.

Thanks Jay

Great info and very articulately expressed.

Juice: Yeah, that's where I'm coming from too.

ORIGINAL: juicerocks

I recently started working with videos and audio and files more than 4 gb is becoming more and more common. I had to convert over to NTFS after witnessing failed file transfres.

Although DVDs are larger than 4 GB, individual files on them are usually not larger than 1 GB. Are there really many cases where individual files are larger than 4 GB?

ORIGINAL: wormser

One advantage FAT32 has is that if your partition gets corrupted you at least stand some kind of a chance of recovering the data.
With NTFS your chances are very slim.
Of course, FAT32 is a time bomb with it's file allocation table layout etc and NTFS is not supposed to corrupt itself...
Of course it doesn't actually work that way in real life.
Partitioning a drive allows for easier backup.
NTFS has a little command overhead to it but with today's disk drives it doesn't matter like it used to.
NTFS allows for larger file sizes.

etc.....
There is no real reason to use FAT32 anymore.

Bottom line.......NTFS FTW.

At first, I thought you were making a pretty good case for FAT32, regarding recovering data. I hadn't heard of that before. Why would one be more likely to be able to retrieve data from a corrupt partition if the drive is formatted FAT32?

Yet, you conclude that NTFS is better.

I guess if one may ever use a Mac in the future, it might be better to have the external drive formatted as FAT32, as Macs don't read NTFS. Or--can the new Intel-Macs read NTFS? What about Linux--can it read NTFS?

Do most folks format to the largest cluster size, 4096 bytes? I think larger cluster sizes are supposed to be faster, although due to slack, would give one somewhat less storage space, depending on how many small files you have.

ORIGINAL: maikii

Do most folks format to the largest cluster size, 4096 bytes? I think larger cluster sizes are supposed to be faster, although due to slack, would give one somewhat less storage space, depending on how many small files you have.

4096 is not the largest, 64K is. For the audio drive, where most of the storage is WAV files over 64K, this is definitely preferred even though you may lose a few bytes of storage here and there. Disk space is cheap these days.