[StratComm]

Originally posted by CP5670
The only real limit is the 4GB one for individual files, but I never had any files that big.

I guess this is getting a bit off topic...

That's a rather annoying arbitrary limit (ok, so not so arbitrary), and when you do hit it there's not really an obvious indication that this is the case.  Videos tend to come close, as I've run in to this problem a few times when dealing with digitized content.  Anyway, yes this is a little off-topic.

OSX on a PC seems like a waste to me, as it's essentially a pretty linux that doesn't support linux software directly with poor driver support.  On a machine that it's designed for (and for which proper drivers are available) then I could see the value, but as a second OS for the hell of it I could think of much better alternatives IMHO.

[vyper]

Wait a damned minute. I thought NTFS was supposed to be overall faster?

[karajorma]

Originally posted by CP5670
It worked fine for me for over a year. I was using a 160GB drive in Windows ME. Anyway, that link backs up what I said; you can't format drives that big using the Windows installer, but they work okay otherwise.

That's cause I made a mistake and posted the wrong bloody link

This one is the one I meant to post

As you can see the 32GB isn't the only one FAT32 suffers from. For instance you got very lucky with your 160GB drive if that was all one partition as Scandisk gets horribly confused once it gets over 127GB.

Of course that doesn't affect you on an XP system

Originally posted by CP5670
The only real limit is the 4GB one for individual files, but I never had any files that big.

First time you try to use a DVD iso you'll hit it though. Trying to convert intro.MVE using mve2avi is one example I ran into personally.

That's not all though. NTFS is much more resistant to corruption or damage from crashes. And you don't have to sit arround twiddling your thumbs while you wait for chkdsk to finish when you reboot either.

Originally posted by vyper
Wait a damned minute. I thought NTFS was supposed to be overall faster?

I've heard both sides argued and I've always gone with it being faster but since it seems a contentious issue I'm avoiding that completely apart from saying that even if it isn't by default you can always change your cluster size and level the playing field between the two.

[Sesquipedalian]

Originally posted by Sandwich
How smoothly do the fluid OSX window animation effects work on that lappy?

Fairly smooth.  The only real issue I have is sound.  Despite my hacking, the hardware doesn't work with OS X.

Originally posted by SadisticSid
Hmm, I got OSX to run natively on my Ferarri 4005 but it ran more slowly than in VMWare... complete waste of time hehe.

Did you remove the AppleTPMACPI.kext?  It makes a big difference.  Also, did you install the Maxxuss patches?

[CP5670]

Wait a damned minute. I thought NTFS was supposed to be overall faster?

Not in my experience anyway. The fact that NTFS drives get fragmented about five times as fast as FAT32 ones doesn't help performance either.

That's cause I made a mistake and posted the wrong bloody link

This one is the one I meant to post

As you can see the 32GB isn't the only one FAT32 suffers from. For instance you got very lucky with your 160GB drive if that was all one partition as Scandisk gets horribly confused once it gets over 127GB.

Of course that doesn't affect you on an XP system

Maybe. I don't think I ever used Scandisk so I wouldn't know if that had problems, but there were no issues apart from that. At first, the 137GB limit did give me some trouble, but that's basically a hardware issue that occurs on both FAT32 and NTFS. I actually have that free Maxtor ATA card that they refer to and still use it in an older system.

First time you try to use a DVD iso you'll hit it though. Trying to convert intro.MVE using mve2avi is one example I ran into personally.

Yeah, I guess it can come up with large movies. In my case the biggest file I had was probably the page file, so it worked out for me.

That's not all though. NTFS is much more resistant to corruption or damage from crashes. And you don't have to sit arround twiddling your thumbs while you wait for chkdsk to finish when you reboot either.

At least there is a good side to it then. The hard disk is the one computer component for which I'll take reliability over speed any day.

The stupid automatic disk checking is easy enough to disable though. You just have to replace one of the XP files with a blank one and that takes care of it. I had to do it on my laptop, which came preformatted with FAT32 for some reason.

[mikhael]

Originally posted by CP5670
I don't like NTFS. It's slow and gets fragmented easily, and I don't need the compression and encryption functionality. It would be too much work for me to switch back at this point though.

Actually, compression and encryption are the least valuable points of NTFS for the end user.

The first and most important feature that you should be caring about is journalling (yay! no more screwy corrupted files and stupid chkdsks!). The second, of course, is metadata (file security. real filesystem level security!). The third is mount points.

There's absolutely no excuse to use Fat32, even for speed. If your issue is the extra overhead of loading the metadata when you look at a directory, tell Windows not to load it. Using Fat32 to avoid the load time is like ripping your Pentium4 out of your PC in favor of a P2 so DOS run better.

As for fragmentation, if you actually track the fragmentation, you'll see that there's no difference between the filesystems. They both use the same system (essentially) for reallocating freed space. The main difference, of course, is that NTFS handles fragmented files better than Fat32.

[CP5670]

There's absolutely no excuse to use Fat32, even for speed. If your issue is the extra overhead of loading the metadata when you look at a directory, tell Windows not to load it. Using Fat32 to avoid the load time is like ripping your Pentium4 out of your PC in favor of a P2 so DOS run better.

How do I do that? It would be really nice if I could eliminate those delays.

DOS should run very well on a P4 though. I can use it on an A64 just fine.

As for fragmentation, if you actually track the fragmentation, you'll see that there's no difference between the filesystems. They both use the same system (essentially) for reallocating freed space. The main difference, of course, is that NTFS handles fragmented files better than Fat32.

Whatever the case, Diskeeper reports a fragmentation "warning" pretty much every two months now. I used to run it something like once a year with FAT32. At least the actual defrag runs are much faster on NTFS.

[karajorma]

Same version of Diskkeeper? Not that it matters it could simply be that it's reporting fragmentation differently on both drives. Maybe with the NTFS disk it's telling you to defrag as soon as it hits one level but is waiting for a much higher level with FAT32.

As Mik says there's really no huge difference in the speed that the two fragment at and since you should really defrag once a month it's pretty moot anyway.  

Originally posted by CP5670
Not in my experience anyway. The fact that NTFS drives get fragmented about five times as fast as FAT32 ones doesn't help performance either.

I've got no idea what you're doing wrong. I tried the example you gave of opening the system32 folder and it popped up in less than a second.

I've never noticed any speed difference between NTFS and FAT32 but most articles I've seen say that on small drives (Around 1-2GB) FAT32 is faster but on any realistic drive size they are both the same with NTFS taking the lead as drives get larger.

Originally posted by CP5670
Maybe. I don't think I ever used Scandisk so I wouldn't know if that had problems, but there were no issues apart from that.

Scandisk runs after every crash on winME so you probably would have seen it a lot Remember that since it can't touch the final 20GB of your drive any errors on there would not have been fixed which means that all of a sudden you could lose something important. I think this is exactly the problem TopAce had with his drive a couple of months ago.  (It was definately either the 127 or the 137GB limit he hit).

Originally posted by CP5670
The stupid automatic disk checking is easy enough to disable though. You just have to replace one of the XP files with a blank one and that takes care of it. I had to do it on my laptop, which came preformatted with FAT32 for some reason.

The problem with disabling it is it's like cutting the seatbelts and airbags out of your car. Everything works fine until you have a big crash.  

[Descenterace]

I've got a FAT32 partition (used as neutral territory between Windoze and Slackware) so I can compare it directly to NTFS.

FAT32 sucks for large numbers of files. It takes a full minute to open a folder containing 8 items, simply because one of those items happens to be the JDK1.5 documentation, ie. a very large directory tree. On NTFS, this problem doesn't appear.

FAT32 is crap. It has nothing to recommend it. It handles fragmentation badly, the seek times are silly, the admin overhead is colossal, the file list structure is laughably inefficient, and if it's not unmounted properly it takes roughly 1 minute per 50 gigs to check its integrity.
In the aforementioned comparision of filesystems, FAT and FAT32 were lagging waaaaaaay behind all the others.

[CP5670]

Same version of Diskkeeper? Not that it matters it could simply be that it's reporting fragmentation differently on both drives. Maybe with the NTFS disk it's telling you to defrag as soon as it hits one level but is waiting for a much higher level with FAT32.

As Mik says there's really no huge difference in the speed that the two fragment at and since you should really defrag once a month it's pretty moot anyway.  

Yes, version 8 in both cases. I have heard quite a few people complaining of this same issue on NTFS partitions though.

There is no way I can remember to do it every month. I'm not even sure how much of a difference fragmentation makes for actual performance; I have never experienced the stutters or long access times that others talk about.

I've got no idea what you're doing wrong. I tried the example you gave of opening the system32 folder and it popped up in less than a second.

I looked into this a bit and it seems that there is a registry tweak to disable something that may be causing this, possibly what mikhael was talking about. Maybe you have activated that? I don't think I have, so I'm going to see if I can find out more about it.

Scandisk runs after every crash on winME so you probably would have seen it a lot Remember that since it can't touch the final 20GB of your drive any errors on there would not have been fixed which means that all of a sudden you could lose something important. I think this is exactly the problem TopAce had with his drive a couple of months ago.  (It was definately either the 127 or the 137GB limit he hit).

The Scandisk on startup feature can be disabled on Win9X systems without any weird hacking; there is an option in msconfig to do it. I think you're right about the 127GB limit with Scandisk, but I never used Scandisk as I said. The 137GB limit is a hardware issue and doesn't have anything to do with the file system.

The problem with disabling it is it's like cutting the seatbelts and airbags out of your car. Everything works fine until you have a big crash.

I just use other software though, the stuff on the CD that came with my hard drive. There are lots of third party utilities that do a better job than Scandisk or Autochk.

FAT32 sucks for large numbers of files. It takes a full minute to open a folder containing 8 items, simply because one of those items happens to be the JDK1.5 documentation, ie. a very large directory tree. On NTFS, this problem doesn't appear.

I'm getting exactly the opposite effect. The windows\system32 directory on the main computer with an NTFS partitioned drive has about 2300 files and takes around 6.5 seconds to load the folder. On the laptop's FAT32 partition (on a slower, 5400rpm drive), the same folder has about 2100 files and it comes up immediately.

Maybe it has to something to do with the viewing program? I don't use Windows Explorer (and never will), but instead a third party thing called Turbo Navigator. I don't know how that would cause it, but I will try it in Explorer later and see if it still happens.

[Descenterace]

Another thing: Fragmentation on NTFS partitions has less impact on performance than it does on FAT32. It doesn't matter if they do become fragmented faster, since you won't notice a performance hit.

Never noticed anything wrong with Explorer myself. Bear in mind that third party apps probably use different services to access the disk. Explorer likely has higher security privileges since it's a basic part of Windows.
Also, Explorer is always in memory. It caches filesystem information even when it's not displayed.

[CP5670]

I tried out explorer and it does the same thing, so I guess that had nothing to do with it.

Another thing: Fragmentation on NTFS partitions has less impact on performance than it does on FAT32. It doesn't matter if they do become fragmented faster, since you won't notice a performance hit.

I never noticed any actual performance degredation on either of them actually, but if this is true then the fragmentation may not be much of an issue anyway.