Is FAT32 faster (I mean very fast) than NFS?

[Anusha]

Hi fellas,
This is regarding my hard disk, Seagate Barracuda ST340014A, 7200RPM, 40GB, ATA100 (using Ultra DMA mode 5)

I don’t know whether this is the right place to put this thread, so point out if I’m wrong. I’m currently using Windows XP on FAT32 file system. I had NTFS but found out and also experienced that the data transfer rate of the Hard Disk was very low at that time. About 8 to 15 MB/s. This is unbelievably low compared to 35MB/s transfer rate on FAT32!

Has anyone else faced this problem? I know this is not that much of a problem, but I wish I had NTFS because of the Indexing service of it. It can defrag my hard disk faster than when using FAT32, but fails when it comes to intensive data read/writes.

I measured this using Sandra 2003Pro. And I saw that there isn’t much difference between those results in other hard disks. I also had a Quantum Fireball 20GB ATA33 hard disk and it gave about the same speeds when benchmarked, about 8GB/s.
And another thing. Which NTFS version is better, I mean the in Win2K or WinXP?

Thanks in Advance.

[Fahrenheit451]

Not sure abt speed but here's some info :

NTFS.com

[Shinma]

If applicable,
Install the most current chipset drivers for mobo in question.

[Berserker]

Thanks or the great link Fahrenheit451.

If you're using the Nforce 2 chipset mobo, there's a patch that will fix the slowness that is caused by XP..

[Fahrenheit451]

Q & A from the site :

Q: How does NTFS compared to FAT32 in Windows XP, and which is faster?

A: NTFS has much more built-in features than FAT, so generally it is a bit slower.

However it depends on many factors such as cluster size, average file size, etc.

For example, NTFS can keep small files inside MFT entry, so if the file size is less than cluster size, most likely it will be accessed much faster on NTFS than on FAT.

Generally speaking the performance of NTFS on large volumes is higher than performance of FAT32. NTFS performance on small volumes is lower than performance of FAT/FAT32.

[Anusha]

Yeah, I heard. But how big is 'large' volumes? I'm not sure whether this is true in real life. But anyway, I choose not to move on to NTFS again, until I see WinFS with Longhorn or whatever the next major ms os might be

[Fahrenheit451]

However it depends on many factors such as cluster size, average file size, etc.

A benchmark would show different results on different systems.

BTW M$ says they're gonna delay release of its Longhorn until 2005.

[Anusha]

Oh, I knew that much, lol.

[Fahrenheit451]