NTFS is the recommended file system for Windows XP and provides a number of benefits in terms of functionality, security, stability, availability, reliability, and performance. There are very few reasons to persist with FAT32.
A Microsoft knowledge base article for Windows XP Home Edition, Professional, and 64-Bit Edition. This article discusses the limitations of the FAT32 file system in Windows XP.
Reasons to Retain FAT32
Dual and Multibooting: If you want to install Windows 95 or 98 with Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000, the boot volume must be formatted as FAT, not NTFS, because Windows 95 and Windows 98 must be installed on the boot volume when more than one operating system is installed, and FAT is the only file system those systems support. Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP support FAT32 volumes. (Read TechNet article )
Small Disks: If you have old, low capacity drives of 20GB or less, FAT32 may afford a performance increase. For partitions of 2GB or less, FAT is recommended.
Required for Applications: Only in very rare circumstances do applications require a particular file system. The file system is normally independent of the application. If your application requires FAT or FAT32, you might wish to consider your need to continue using it or try to obtain an upgrade.
Features not needed: If you do not need NTFS security, encryption, its performance enhancements or support for large disks, then there is no real reason to use it. If you later decide to use NTFS, you can convert FAT32 to NTFS. The conversion process is discussed later in this article. You should read that section now even if you decide that you don't want NTFS at the moment.
Benefits of NTFS
Support for large hard drives in excess of 127GB.
Support for large files. NTFS in Windows XP supports a maximum file size up to the capacity of the disk. FAT32 supports a maximum file size of only 4 GB.
Simple management of single disk partitions. No reboot is required between creating a new partition and formatting it.
Improved performance, optimised for general performance and boot times.
The size of the Master File Table (MFT) and its location are optimised based on the hard drive characteristics.
DISKPART and FORMAT takes about 90 seconds on a large hard drive.
NTFS incorporates advanced file system features such as security, transacted operations, large volumes, and better performance on larger disks. These are not available on either FAT or FAT32 disks.
File compression and encryption. Third-party tools are not required.
Volume shadow copy backup enable backups to be made without rebooting.
A local hard drive can be mounted to a folder on an NTFS volume.
NTFS is a journaling file system. It writes a log of changes being made to the files on disk. This offers significant benefits in cases where a system is susceptible to power loss, experiences an unexpected reboot, or a crash. NTFS can quickly return a disk to a consistent state without running CHKDSK, whereas FAT32 always requires CHKDSK to be run effect recovery if a failure occurs.
CHKDSK can take a very long time to complete on larger FAT32 drives but is very quick on NTFS.
Both FAT and FAT32 have scaling and compatibility limitations that NTFS does not have. An NTFS volume is capable of scaling on very large disk sizes with a single partition and supports software RAID.
For more technical information on the benefits of NTFS, read the Microsoft Windows Hardware and Driver Central article on NTFS Preinstallation and Windows XP.
For information on how Windows XP dynamically self-tunes, read the Windows Hardware and Driver Central article about Benchmarking on Windows XP Home Edition and Professional. The article also covers disk efficiency optimisations, boot and application-launch prefetching, as well as idle task scheduling.
Red Herrings
FAT32 Has Better Performance and is More Efficient Than NTFS
This is completely untrue. NTFS is much more efficient than FAT32. Larger disks that are formatted FAT32 require far bigger File Tables. Larger file tables take longer to read. It is this for reason that XP will not allow you to create a FAT32 volume greater than 32GB in size.
XP Does Not Support FAT32 Drives Larger than 32GB
This is completely untrue. It does not follow that XP does not support FAT32 drives greater than 32GB just because it will not allow you to create a FAT32 volume greater than 32GB. If a disk is preformatted with FAT32, right up to the theoretical limit for FAT32 disks, XP will support it.
Windows 98 Cannot Read NTFS
This is only true insofar as Windows 98 cannot natively read NTFS disks. If you need to access a NTFS partition via Windows 98, you accomplish this with a third-party driver. Sysinternals offer a free, read-only driver that will allow Windows 98 to read a NTFS partition. If you need full read/write access
NTFS Does Not Fragment
This is completely untrue. File fragmentation is a fact of life, irrespective of the underlying file system. Files increase and decrease in size with use, or are created, deleted and recreated over and over. Operating Systems attempt to keep parts of files in their place as new clusters are added as and when they are needed. The allocation of additional clusters cannot be guaranteed to follow on sequentially from where the file currently resides and are almost always allocated from a completely different location on the disk. It is this allocation process that causes fragmentation.
If it were true that NTFS does not fragment, why is Windows XP shipped with a defragmentation tool?
DOS FDISK Does Not Support NTFS or FDISK Can Format NTFS Partitions
Uninformed rumours and unfounded statements about Windows 98 or DOS 6 FDISK make up one of the fishiest smelling red herrings about NTFS. The fact of the matter is, FDISK does not format any kind of partition. FDISK is a rudimentary partition manager. Furthermore, FDISK can work with NTFS partitions but it cannot delete NTFS partitions that are logical drives on extended partitions.
There are Very Few Recovery Tools for NTFS
This is completely untrue. Not only does Windows XP ship with some very extensive system recovery and protection tools, it includes an impressive range of disaster recovery tools, far beyond what earlier versions of Windows ever provided. Plus there are a great munber of third-party tools available, a lot of them free, to supplement those that come with XP.
Windows XP provides advanced disk and maintenance tools you can use to prevent problems from occurring. Some of the most useful tools are discussed in the Dealing with Data Corruption article on this site. The disk-related tools allow you to view disk information and correct a problem before it becomes a serious issue.
Independent Viewpoints
You should make up your own mind about using NTFS or FAT32 and you should not rely on only one source of infomation. Read the two-part article listed below or use this link to visit google and search for more information with relevant keywords.
Converting FAT32 to NTFS
If you decide to stay with FAT32, you can always CONVERT your file system to NTFS, however there are a number of issues that you must consider before taking the conversion route. The problems to contend with range from permissions issues to performance degradation.
Permissions: The convert procedure uses the default security settings specified in a file called "Setup Security.inf". If Windows XP was initially installed on a FAT32 partition, the default security settings are not appropriate for NTFS. A workaround is available from microsoft.com.
Performance: On volumes that are created (not converted) as NTFS volumes, clusters start at sector zero, therefore every cluster is aligned on what is known as the cluster boundary. If the FAT32 partition was not created by Windows XP or Windows 2000, the FAT/FAT32 reserved structures mean that a FAT/FAT32 format cannot guarantee that data clusters will be aligned on a cluster boundary. In turn, this can cause the conversion process to be forced to use 512k clusters, thus causing a potentially serious degradation in disk performance.
Tools are available to convert FAT/FAT32 to 4k aligned clusters, but the process is not recommended for the novice thus a clean install with a NTFS format should be considered in preference to a conversion. Read these Microsoft articles for more information:
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