FAT32/NTSF Questions ?

jboy wrote on 2/27/2003, 1:45 PM

I have my C: drive as FAT32-( because I like being able to use DOS for various and sundry things), and my D:(Video) drive as NTSF. Have a couple of questions relative to this:

1.-Am I taking a speed hit, because I'm loading my NTSF video files into a FAT32 partition when I'm running Vegas ? I understand that FAT32 is actually supposed to run a little faster than NTSF, but wonder if the conversion process slows things down in reality. And how does this work exactly ? Are my video files on the NTSF drive manipulated in some proxy way on the FAT32 partition, or are they converted and reconverted on the fly when I move them in and out of Vegas ?

2.-Am I going to be limited to 4GB project sizes in Vegas, if I install it on a FAT32 partition ? I know Vegas gets around this limitation when capturing by seamlessly creating contiguous 4GB files, but is a similiar thing happening on the timeline ? To be more precise, is the FAT32 system going to limit projects on the timeline to 4GB or less, even though it'll allow you to load as many GB as you want onto it ? Will I be able to render out a 5GB project on a file system that has a 4GB limitation ?

Comments

jetdv wrote on 2/27/2003, 2:04 PM

Having a FAT32 OS partition and an NTFS video partition is not problem. Go ahead and install Vegas on the OS partition - FAT32 makes no difference to the program installation. However, once installed, make sure all capture, temporary ... directories in Vegas point to the Video partition (There's at least 3 or 4 places that need modified). Anything stored on the video partition will NOT be limited to 4GB. If you try to store video on the FAT32 partition, it WILL be limited to 4GB.

Chienworks wrote on 2/27/2003, 2:05 PM

The files are not copied to the FAT32 partition simply by accessing them from Vegas. Vegas reads the files from where they are; it doesn't have to move them. Media files aren't loaded into Vegas. They are only referred to by events on the timeline.

There is no file conversion when moving files from FAT32 to NTFS or NTFS to FAT32. The file structure and contents remain identical. The only limitation is that you can't copy a file larger than 4GB from NTFS to FAT32.

Vegas will create files as large as the file system where the files are being stored allows. Even though Vegas is running on the FAT32 partition, if it's writing it's output to the NTFS partition then it won't be limited by FAT32. Where Vegas is installed has no effect on the data it processes. For that matter, Vegas isn't running in the FAT32 partition; it's actually running in RAM.

Nat wrote on 2/27/2003, 3:04 PM

A little info about NTFS.
The smallest cluster group size in NTFS is 4kb compared to 16kb for fat32.
What it means is that if you put a text document with only one character in it, the real size is 1 byte. On an NTFS partition the file will take 4kb of diskspace.
On a FAT32 partition, it will take 16kb of space on the harddisk.

No more Fat32 for me that's for sure.

jboy wrote on 2/27/2003, 7:32 PM

Thanks Folks. Question answered..

ibliss wrote on 2/27/2003, 7:44 PM

I gather from what I've read that it is the smaller cluster size that increases the read/write overhead slightly.

If you have a partition devoted to storing DV footage, which is always going to be in the hundreds to thousands of MB then you won't be wasting much space due to larger cluster sizes, and would actually be better off using the larger cluster size. XP lets you choose this when formating a partition as NTFS (I think 4k is the default - don't recall off-hand).

It's actually your system drive that will benifit more from the smaller cluster size as it stores many hundreds of smaller files.