If you upgraded from say W98SE you wouldn't be able to go back to W98SE unless you left the C partition Fat 32 which I would think some people may have done when they installed it just in case.

It can be converted to NTFS later and I was wondering if people who fell into that category changed it or left it alone and just used NTFS on their video aquisition and/or rendering drives and if that combination has made any difference in terms of performance.

Of course if someone did a clean install it wouldn't be a question. It would only be if they upgraded the OS.

John

I have FAT 32 on my system drive and NTFS on the other drives. I originally did it because I was networked to a Windows ME computer. Now I am just too lazy to change it, and from what I have read, FAT32 has some advantages over NTFS.

Dave T2

NTFS on all drives. Be aware that when converting from FAT32 to NTFS, XP will often pick the wrong cluster size, resulting in sub-par performance.

I see no reason to use FAT32 anymore.

NTFS on all drives is the way go.




ZION.

NTFS on everything

FAT32 on C, NTFS on everything else. Done to maintain compatibility with something I need to do from time to time; can't remember the reason now, but it was important at the time (Note to Self: write things down more often).

Myth-busting time. :)

"If you upgraded from say W98SE you wouldn't be able to go back to W98SE unless you left the C partition Fat 32"

If your other drives were converted to NTFS and you went back to Win98SE then you wouldn't be able to read your other drives. So Leaving the system drive as FAT32 isn't really a help in that instance.

"I have FAT 32 on my system drive and NTFS on the other drives. I originally did it because I was networked to a Windows ME computer."

Not necessary. When you network with a FAT32 computer to an NTFS computer, the NTFS computer's OS is the one that actually reads the NTFS drive, so the FAT32 computer can still send and receive data.

"FAT32 has some advantages over NTFS."

Maybe a slight tiny advantage on old sub-100MB drives. NTFS's file allocation tables take more space, possibly a pretty huge chunk. But on larger drives (say maybe 500MB or greater, if any of you out there are using such humongous monsters...) NTFS's handling of files is more efficient and wastes less space than FAT32. For that matter, XP is smart enough to know to use FAT32 or even FAT16 if the drive in question is small enough benefit from it.

I used to have a dual boot machine with NTFS on the hard drive that booted XP FAT32 on the hard drive that booted Win 98SE and one extra FAT 32 data drive and an extra NTFS data drive.

Now I am no longer dual boot so it is NTFS for all four drives. No problemo!

Chienworks,

Maybe I did something wrong then, because my ME computer could not read the NTFS disk on the XP computer at the time.

Now they are both XP so it is pretty much a mute point.

Also, with a FAT32 system disk, you can use DOS tools, which I believe is not always possible on a NTFS disk. Here again, not much of an issue, but enough to justify my laziness. :)

Dave T2

Some of the early revs of XP and Win2000 seemed to not allow 98 and ME to access shares. This was assumed to be a ploy on Microsoft's part to get more people to upgrade to XP. I have no idea if that is the case or not. However, around the time that XP SP1 came out, this was no longer a problem. Whether this was a bug that got fixed, or a deliberate act that Microsoft finally caved in on, i don't know. In fact, with SP2 Microsoft also brought back simple folder sharing as well, much to the relief of many users.

On my network i've had 98SE, 98, ME, 95, Macs, and even Win 3.11 reading from and writing to XP shares.

Myth-busting time. :)

"If you upgraded from say W98SE you wouldn't be able to go back to W98SE unless you left the C partition Fat 32"
--
If your other drives were converted to NTFS and you went back to Win98SE then you wouldn't be able to read your other drives. So Leaving the system drive as FAT32 isn't really a help in that instance.
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Sure it is.

If like many videographers you keep all your programs and the OS on the C: drive and use other physical drives for aquisition and rendering (as I mentioned above) then you are constantly erasing what is on them anyway so it makes absolutely no difference if you have to reformat them or convert them to FAT32 again because they don't contain data you save permanently anyway.

John