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Chris
I'd highly recommend switching to NTFS file system. It has a number of
advantages and should be faster except--possibly--on smaller partition
hard disks. FAT is a dinosaur from DOS days, has no fault tolerance,
stored its file directory in an extremely inefficient place on the disk
(especially as disks got larger)and made obscenely inefficient use of
disk space (again, especially as disks got larger). Then with Win95,
Microsoft's elegant solution was "VFAT", a gross kludge of FAT to
accomodate long filenames, and in a way that would be incompatible with
IBM's OS/2 (which was at that time a pretty decent 32-bit OS, and hence
potential threat to Microsoft). FAT was then "modernized" into its
32-bit incarnation, FAT32. Its principle advantage over FAT16 is it
makes more efficent use of physical space on large disks. Great, you
now no longer have a dinosaur. You have something capable of
functioning, albeit with little grace, in the modern world. Say, a
crocodile.
Dump FAT.
Ian
ps: You can use NT's CONVERT utility to convert FAT16 to NTFS. If you
want maximum flexibility I'd suggest getting Partition Magic-about $40.
It lets you convert back and forth, adds FAT32 capability also, lets you
resize partitions, etc. Very flexible.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Subject: off topic: NT partition types
> Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2000 11:27:52 -0800
> From: "Chris Cheatham" <nchrisc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
> I recently switched from win98 2nd ed. with Windows optimized FAT32 to NT4
> SP5 for TS4. Everything is great except disk access is very slow -- pages
> take much longer to load. I am wondering if it has something to do with
> partition types -- curious what others feel are the most efficient.
> Currently have NT and TS on a 4 gig FAT16 partition (64 K clusters) IDE.
> Not interested in switching to SCSI -- just looking to get closer to what I
> had before. I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on any of the following?
>
> 1. Would going to smaller partitions with smaller clusters increase speed?
>
> 2. Would putting TS on a FAT32 partition (using the Winternals FAT32 driver)
> increase speed?
> 2a. Could the FAT32 driver be slowing things down?
>
> 3. Is NTFS faster than FAT16 -- I have heard conflicting reports?
>
> 4. Would there be any significant speed increase by putting TS on a similar
> 2nd physical drive?
>
> 5. Running all partitions as FAT32 except for NT seems a logical choice,
> except that you cannot defrag the FAT32 partitions without going into 95/98.
> Anyone know of a way to defrag a FAT32 disk from a DOS floppy or someway
> without having a whole OS just for that purpose?
> 5a. Any recommendations for NT defrag utilities in general?
>
> I realize a this issue goes away with NT2000, but I figure they need 6-12 mo
> for others to find the bugs before I jump in. Any advice would be
> appreciated.
>
> Regards,
>
> Chris Cheatham
> (reply to nchrisc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
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