NTFS is faster and more secure, but it depends on how you use it. Their are so many options working when windows is first installed that it can really bog down any system. I suggest going to http://www.tweaktown.com and look for the windows XP tweak guide, this will make your Windows XP in NTFS work faster.
I used to like FAT32, but now i cant really tell the difference and i like things being more secure so im sticking with NTFS. Since choosing either doesnt really affect your OS too much, using one or the other won;t make any massive differences.
Is that referring to security from other people (the encryption) or security in the sense that the data is more likely to be recoverable if the drive fails? I remember reading somewhere that the master file table and boot sector are somehow less likely to be damaged if the disk starts to fail, which would be nice.
I have disabled all the useless stuff from Windows for good. The indexing and system restore services can especially the hog the hard disk, so those were the first things I turned off.
Apart from the fragging, the only other differences I have noticed are that Windows with NTFS seems to handle recycle bins a bit differently and also creates a directory called System Volume Information in the drive root. By default it's actually set so that even administrators don't have permissions to even read this folder; although it only contains one file, something I know is used only by a service I have turned off, I am a bit hesitant to delete the directory altogether given that it's the only windows directory that cannot be read at all by default.
I would think that for a hdd with that capacity it would have an rpm of nothing slower than 10,000 and have a slightly large cache, or have at least a SATA connection.
I hardly think its NTFS to blame, though I do remember NEVER defragging my old FAT32 system and it only showed a minor decrease in performance.
I really can't think of anything that could be causing the trouble except an increase in the use of the hdd and its space. Like Lonestar suggested the WinXP Tweak Guide might help slightly. Another suggestion is running the drive through defrag a few times, sequentially. Of course this also may only show a slight improvement.
I don't think there are any 10k drives of any kind with that capacity. The closest ones are the 181GB U320 SCSI drives, which cost over $600 plus the controller's price. 8MB buffers are basically standard today, although there are a few new ones coming out with 16MB in the fall. The capacity doesn't have much to do with the speed though, as the higher capacity HDs in a product line are the same as the lower ones but with more platters/heads added on. 250GB and 300GB drives can also be found now and I think Hitachi released a 400GB one recently with the same spindle speed, cache size and even platter densities. If the drive was nearly full then it would indeed cause this sort of thing, but I have only used up around 40GB of it, so that can't be the case here.
The thing is, I was using FAT32 on a 160GB but otherwise identical unit and never had these problems, but that HD was really screwed up in other ways. I sent it in to maxtor and the replacement they gave me was a 200GB version of the same model line (for no added cost
). I formatted it with a single NTFS partition with 4096b clusters and have been getting these frags very often. IIRC I actually had more of the Windows services running with the old disk, although those two big ones were turned off.
Oh well, I suppose it would take more work to go back to FAT32 now than to stick with NTFS and defrag every now and then, so I might as well keep it the way it is...
