NTFS vs. FAT32

Glonk asks: "I've tried searching for a good page outlining the differences between NTFS and FAT32, but I couldn't find any really informative sites. Does anyone know the advantages and disadvantages of NTFS over FAT32? I'm wondering if it'll be worth reformatting my drive to NTFS whenever WinXP gets released."

Comments

Advantages of NTFS

[Anonymous Coward]

RecoverabilityThe recoverability designed into NTFS is such that a user should seldom have to run a disk repair program on an NTFS volume. NTFS guarantees the consistency of the volume by using standard transaction logging and recovery techniques. In the event of a system failure, NTFS uses its log file and checkpoint information to automatically restore the consistency of the file system.

CompressionWindows2000 supports compression on an individual file basis for NTFS volumes. Files that are compressed on an NTFS volume can be read and written by any Windows-based application without first being decompressed by another program. Decompression happens automatically during the read of the file. The file is compressed again when it is closed or saved.

In addition, formatting your volumes with NTFS instead of FAT16 or FAT32 provides the following advantages:

• There are some Windows2000 operating system features that require NTFS.
• Faster access speed. NTFS minimizes the number of disk accesses required to find a file.
• File and folder security. On NTFS volumes, you can set file permissions on files and folders that specify which groups and users have access to them, and what level of access is permitted. NTFS file and folder permissions apply both to users working at the computer where the file is stored and to users accessing the file over the network when the file is in a shared folder. With NTFS you can also set share permissions that operate on shared folders in combination with file and folder permissions.
• Windows2000 can format volumes up to 2terabytes in size with NTFS.
• The boot sector is backed up to a sector at the end of the volume.
• NTFS supports a native encryption system called Encrypting File System (EFS), using public-key security to prevent unauthorized access to file contents.
• NTFS functionality can be extended by using reparse points, enabling new features such as volume mount points.
• Disk quotas can be set, limiting the amount of space users can consume on an NTFS volume.
• Multiple Data Streams.

POSIX Compliance

If you want POSIX compliance, you must use NTFS. POSIX compliance permits UNIX programs to be ported to Windows2000. Windows2000 is fully compliant with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) standard 1003.1, which is a standard for file naming and identification.

The following POSIX-compliant features are included in NTFS:

• Case-sensitive naming. For example, POSIX would interpret README.TXT, Readme.txt, and readme.txt as different files.
• Hard links. A file can be given more than one name. This allows two different file names, which can be located in different folders, to point to the same data.
• Additional time stamps. These show when the file was last accessed or modified.

The Disadvantages

[DVega]

There were some posts talking about the advantages. Now the disadvantages. (At least the ones I know)

You can not access NTFS disks from DOS or Win9x. If you have any programs that don't run on WinNT (eg. some DOS games) you will be unable to run those programs, unless you also have a FAT/32 (FAT or FAT32) partition.

If you create a FAT/32 partition in orther to dual boot, you will be unable to access the files on the NTFS partition when you boot from the FAT/32 partition.

From Linux the read/write access to files on NTFS partitions is not as reliable as FAT/32. The NTFS driver is still in "experimental" stage (At least in kernel 2.2.x, I didn't check 2.4.x). If you don't use Linux, this is not a problem.

I don't know if there are any undelete utilities for NTFS.

Nevertheless, I think NTFS is a good choice if you use WinNT (or any variant).