Comments for Should I convert my FAT32 drives to NTFS?

Comment from Essam on 2008-07-29

2008-07-29T13:46:17Z

Is it possible to read an NTFS drive from DOS ?
If it's possible then what's the best way to do that ?

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A comment on: Should I convert my FAT32 drives to NTFS?

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Comment from Linda on 2007-07-20

2007-07-21T02:05:00Z

I disagree. I have no problem with a 2GB NTFS formatted flash drive being read in BIOS. As flash drives become larger (8 & 16GB) it becomes more significant with someone using them for video, to convert to NTFS. They can still be safely removed without losing data.

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A comment on: Should I convert my FAT32 drives to NTFS?

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Comment from John Ellerington on 2007-07-09

2007-07-09T09:02:16Z

I agree that changing your file system to NTFS is good advice, with one exception - USB flash drives. These generally come formatted as FAT32. A common use for these drives is to back up your BIOS - as far as I know, all BIOS loading programs will only read a USB flash drive that's formatted as FAT32.

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A comment on: Should I convert my FAT32 drives to NTFS?

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Comment from Simon on 2007-07-04

2007-07-04T17:41:11Z

There are quite a few other advantages to NTFS over FAT32 as well, especially under the hood.

For a start, you can't create > 4GB files in FAT32. This can be a problem with things like video editing.

Then there's journalling, which NTFS does and FAT32 doesn't. That's the sort of thing, like backing up regularly, that is completely useless in day-to-day use but you'll be very thankful for if something goes wrong. For example, if there's a power cut in the middle of a write operation, with NTFS the system will use the jornal to automatically clean-up the half-done operation on next boot-up -- with FAT32, you'd have to run CHKDSK /F and hope it finds and fixes it without corrupting any data.

Then there's fragmentation. NTFS is pretty good at keeping performance detriment due to fragmentation to a minimum, especially if the hard disk is less than half full; e.g. through the use of extents ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extent_(file_systems) ). FAT32 has no mechanisms for anticipating or preventing fragmentation at all.

Etc., etc. The point is, for internal hard drives, Microsoft's efforts to try and get people to switch to NTFS are for good reason. Even "Linux currently only handles reading NTFS partitions" is no longer true: ntfs-3g (http://www.ntfs-3g.org) was declared stable on 21 February 2007, and is perfectly capable of writing to NTFS partitions with negligible chance of data loss. NTFS should really be the default choice (especially for >32GB paritions) for anyone trying to decide on a file system.

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A comment on: Should I convert my FAT32 drives to NTFS?

Tech Questions? Get Answers! - Ask Leo! ... by Leo Notenboom
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