Seems like such a lot of fuss for a simple question. If you think you'll have more than 4gb files then go NTFS.
All this talk about watse space at a time when terabyte hard drives are quite reasonably priced.
And performance from dual and quad processors as well as higher ram makes dealing with audio almost hardly a challenge at all compared to just a few years ago.

I don't think now sqeezing everything you can out of a system is really going to make enough of a difference to make it worth the effort.

Spend more time making music and having fun.
Make it til you break it. Then upgrade.

ORIGINAL: juicerocks

Seems like such a lot of fuss for a simple question. If you think you'll have more than 4gb files then go NTFS.
All this talk about watse space at a time when terabyte hard drives are quite reasonably priced.
And performance from dual and quad processors as well as higher ram makes dealing with audio almost hardly a challenge at all compared to just a few years ago.

I don't think now sqeezing everything you can out of a system is really going to make enough of a difference to make it worth the effort.

Spend more time making music and having fun.
Make it til you break it. Then upgrade.

+1
I currently have 4 drives, each 7200rpm and all 250g or larger.
I slap them in, format NTFS and am done.
I don't bother partitioning anything.

Storage is cheap these days and I think some of us old farts are remembering the days of 40g drives etc.

Or even our first two megabyte hard drives...... Or even adding that second floppy drive.....

ORIGINAL: farrarbc

Or even our first two megabyte hard drives...... Or even adding that second floppy drive.....

Hahaha!!
Yea, I go back to before the original PC, when we were using magnetic core storage in IBM mainframes.
Not as far as vacuum tubes though!!!

The good old days!

I just got a one terabyte external (USB 2.0) drive, and it came pre-formatted FAT32, all as one big partition. So I guess it is possible to format FAT32 in larger sizes. Perhaps it was formatted on a Mac. Certainly readable by Windows XP though.

I guess if i format it to NTFS though, I couldn't later (since I don't have a Mac) change my mind and re-format it to FAT32, except in small partitions. (There may be some Windows utilities though, that could format large FAT32 drives.)

Is FAT32 really noticeably faster than NTFS, in Windows? Have tests been done that prove that?

Here's a good repair tool for NTFS drives:
http://www.restorer2000.com/

ORIGINAL: jay_zhead ~ See, any hard drive can access the clusters that are closer to the disc's center faster than it can access the outer clusters...

This is true under certain circumstances... but not always. If your disk is near capacity placing frequently accessed data in the center speeds up access time due to reduced head travel. However the outer edge of the disk holds better performance potential.

Short stroking the drive by creating a partition of (usually) 20% to 30% of drive size will keep your data in the best performance area.

The remainder of the drive can be used for archive, storage, drive images, etc.

This would be dependent on whether you could effectively utilize such a small portion of the drive for active files.

ORIGINAL: Dave Allison

Here's a good repair tool for NTFS drives:
http://www.restorer2000.com/

Just looked at the ad, and it does not say that it is only for NTFS drives. It also lists FAT32, and even FAT16.

So---since that utility (and other such utilities) work on both kinds of drives, I don't see how it helps one in deciding which type of format to have.

subtlearts: you're welcome.

wormser: yeh, I don't know what was wrong with me that day I wrote it - some wires got crossed it my mind or something Of course I meant the outer tracks, just reverse what I said before.

SteveJL: I have tested this extensively, partitioned drives perform about 10% worse in any case I've tested right from the get go, and as the partitions get more cluttered it gets steadily worse. All the advanced defragmentaion ulitities I've tried also warn against partitioning your drive if performance is an important factor, unless you partition it to bard off the low performance area, which some people do - but I don't find that nessesary, I just make sure my drive is always at least 40% free and dynamically defrag it once in a while.

i use both ntsf and fat32 and i wil say my fat32 drives are more compatible with the rest of the world (everything seems to see fat32) and recovery has been WAY better on fat32 than ntsf...

Many of my customers use mac and i have a lot of older drives from win98 etc. So fat32 works fine here. I bought acronis disk director and it painlessly converts between all the possible formats.

Drives are cheap nowadays so i would suggest moving the data to a new drive whilst converting formats. Less chance for data corruption.

good luck