Converting to NTFS file system

[poledark]

Done

 

Den

Edited July 12, 2007 by poledark

[Tony U]

What advantages does this confer? I have just bought a 320gb external hard drive and its configured to FAT32 (which I may Keep as it allows me to use it on my Mac as well), and I was just wondering.

[poledark]

In my case Tony, I wanted to save a video of 40 mins and the FAT 32 limited my file size to approx 17 mins, or 4.5 GB

 

I found that a simple R/C on the icon in my computer gave me the option to format to NTFS, and as I had only copied a few items to the new HD I wasn't worried about losing the data. Took a couple of seconds

 

Den

[corydoras]

What advantages does this confer? I have just bought a 320gb external hard drive and its configured to FAT32 (which I may Keep as it allows me to use it on my Mac as well), and I was just wondering.

I let Microsoft explain. They will do a better job than me. I'll just forget bits.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463

[ColinW]

I think the more interesting question would be "Why are XP systems still being sold with FAT32?"

[nick]

probably for reasons of interoperability. Nearly all types of computer can read and write to fat32, many do not have native support for ntfs

[corydoras]

probably for reasons of interoperability. Nearly all types of computer can read and write to fat32, many do not have native support for ntfs

If you have XP installed on your machine there is no good reason to run anything other than NTFS. TonyU's situation is different because he is talking about an external drive.

 

If you do format it to NTFS Tony, your Mac will still be able to read from it, it just wont be able to write back to it. If you need read/write to it configure to share the drive on your network, then the Mac will have read/write access.

[nick]

If you have XP installed on your machine there is no good reason to run anything other than NTFS. TonyU's situation is different because he is talking about an external drive.

 

If you do format it to NTFS Tony, your Mac will still be able to read from it, it just wont be able to write back to it. If you need read/write to it configure to share the drive on your network, then the Mac will have read/write access.

 

Not strictly true.

 

If you happen to have more than one PC in the house or office, as more and more folks do then if anyone of those runs an os such as win98 (still lots out there) MAC osX or 'nix then fat32 is a better option simply because they can all read and write to that natively. If you are not in a situation where you may wish to read or write to it from any other OS then yea completely agree that NTFS is the way to go - apart from small partitions!