What is NTFS and why does everyone recommend I use this instead of FAT32?
I just bought a Western Digital 320gb hard drive. Looking at the forums, everyone recommends reformatting to NTFS to FAT32 before use. What does this all mean and why should I consider it?
I am a PC user and want to use the drive to share data on a network with my Sony PS3 (when I get one…!). My wife uses a Mac Powerbook and it would be cool if she could also use the drive.
What should I do?
July 17th, 2010 at 9:20 am
NTFS or New Technology File System is the standard file system of Windows NT and its descendants Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista.
NTFS replaced Microsoft’s previous FAT file system, used in MS-DOS and early versions of Windows. NTFS has several improvements over FAT such as improved support for metadata and the use of advanced data structures to improve performance, reliability, and disk space utilization plus additional extensions such as security access control lists and file system journaling. The exact specification is a trade secret of Microsoft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
Long story short FAT32 is the older verison…
July 17th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
NTFS files the data in a more efficient matter. It’s more secure, stable and faster. FAT32 is pretty much becoming obsolet. You’d be better off going NTFS since it is better and most likely work better with a PS3. But I don’t know anything about how the network works with them. As for your wife’s stuff, MAC and PC wouldn’t be able to share a hard drive.
July 17th, 2010 at 12:37 pm
NTFS is a more modern and better featured filesystem. Actually, the concept of a filesystem is transparent to you. You only need to make a choice when formatting, and then it goes out of sight.
But there’s reasons to choose NTFS over FAT32. The simplest reason is that you are limited in how many files and how big the files are on FAT32. You can have up to 4GB filesize on FAT32, but not more. Seems a lot, until you realize that a DVD is more than 4GB.
The other reasons are that NTFS uses Unicode for file names. Unicode is used in representing international characters, so it definitely helps to have NTFS. NTFS supports compression of files and permissions on files. This makes NTFS more suitable for security.
Furthermore, the way NTFS is designed, it gains good performance when you have a lot of space (low when you have little), while FAT32 is just the opposite. It’s good when you have little space, but it is a miserable failure on high amounts of diskspace (by high I mean anything over 32 GB).
NTFS is more robust, and you should use it whenever you can.
July 17th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
NTFS is a filing system associated with Windows 2000, XP and Vista. Presumably the drive is external as you are wanting to network the drive to other machines? NTFS is more secure than FAT32 and allows files larger than 4GB (if you are using video files for example) whereas FAT32 has a limit of 4GB per file. However, Mac OSX is based on Linux and can read and write FAT32 but cannot reliably do either with NTFS. If your drive is a network drive (it has an Ethernet port on the back) then sharing this way on NTFS or FAT32 with a PS3 or a Mac shouldn’t be much of a problem but control (formating etc) of the drive would still have to be done with a PC to be stable.
If the drive is internal, unless you set up a home network then the drive can only be used on your PC but with the network, any machine, almost any operating system can be made to read and write to the drive through Windows. Personally I think NTFS is a better choice for Windows stuff but use FAT32 if you need the compatibility.