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Microsoft

NTFS vs. FAT32 61

Posted by Cliff from the is-it-worth-the-reformat dept.
Glonk asks: "I've tried searching for a good page outlining the differences between NTFS and FAT32, but I couldn't find any really informative sites. Does anyone know the advantages and disadvantages of NTFS over FAT32? I'm wondering if it'll be worth reformatting my drive to NTFS whenever WinXP gets released."
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NTFS vs. FAT32 More

NTFS vs. FAT32

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  • Re:NTFS = HPFS; FAT32=FAT16=FAT12=Junk (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    FAT isn't optimized for anything. It was designed to be used on small floppies where organization doesn't matter

    well yes and that means for many small fast updates it is perfect which is why we often "downgrade" partitions on developer boxes.
    NTFS chokes on large numbers of small updates. Why you ask? because the journal updates are often larger than the data updates. We had one person sho's compiles were taking ~10 HOURS on ntfs and once we converted to Fat16 they took about 10 minutes. See the difference.
  • I'd like to reinterate that, based on the original post, this is most likely for a home machine and *not* a server. He's coming from a machine that previously used FAT32, so I'd guess this is the guy's family/game machine. Besides that, how many of NetBSD's multiple file systems are journalling and support ACL's? And of those, if there are any, have had the years of being proven through use? There are a ton of things that open software is good for, but file systems really wont be it for a few years to come still.
  • exactly OS2 and Posix support is a Govt. mandate.easily removed and generally quite useless. I personally have not yet found anything that would not work when I removed these files about 6 related to the compliance issues. I would however be very interested IF SOMEONE DID FIND SOMETHING that required them to run...
  • Security. It's my understanding that you cannot compromise NTFS simply by rebooting with a boot disk. FAT32 is allegedly vulnerable to this.

    This isnt entirely true. There is a linux program that lets you set account passwords on both NTFS and FAT32 NT partitions (upto and including Win2k Advanced Server, not sure about XP though) and can be run entirely off of a floppy. You can grab it here [eunet.no]. Its a good one to add to anyone's toolkit, saved my life a couple times.
  • Security. It's my understanding that you cannot compromise NTFS simply by rebooting with a boot disk. FAT32 is allegedly vulnerable to this.

    This isnt entirely true. There is a linux program that lets you set account passwords on both NTFS and FAT32 NT partitions (upto and including Win2k Advanced Server, not sure about XP though) and can be run entirely off of a floppy. You can grap it here [eunet.no]. Its a good one to add to anyone's toolkit, saved my life a couple times.
  • Yes, it's read/write. and works like a charm.

    My laptop is a dual boot Between FreeBSD 4-Stable and 2k pro, and mounting my NT partiton works like a charm...

    my only problem would be a wa y of mounting FFS on 2k :(

    oh well, I easily solve that by booting to 2k only once a week. :)
  • Wrong.

    First of all, don't bitch about Diskeeper. I've used both the lite and full versions, and believe me when I tell you the full version kicks a**. The lite version is crippleware and is the functional equivalent of the defragger Microsoft includes in Win9x -- in other words, it generally sucks a**. It should only be used as a last resort, when nothing else is available (although I consider it to be better than the piece of sh*t that is Norton SpeedDisk for NT/2k). Yes, the full version of Diskeeper CAN defrag the MFT, contrary to what other people have posted, but IIRC you have to reboot to do so (it defrags the MFT and pagefiles at the same point as a chkdsk takes place).

    To correct a complete falsehood in your post, yes you can put the NT/2k pagefile on a separate partition. I ran NT for at least two years that way. The only thing this disables is the ability to write full memory dumps to disk if the system BSODs.

  • Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert

  • Is it read/write, or read-only? I've only seen read-only drivers for Linux & BeOS, though I've heard of others.

    It drives me nuts that it's so hard to work with my NT partitions when I boot my laptop into BeOS. I keep a "neutral" FAT32 partition just so that both systems can share files.

    I'm sure it would be too much to expect a BFS driver for NT, but a BeOS port of a FreeBSD driver for NTFS would A-OK with me.

  • I thought that only the newer (win2k and XP) versions of ntfs were jornalled ?

    chkdsk seems to be much faster under win2k than NT4, at least on my hardware anyhow, ymmy.

    you can't really get a better filesystem for nt based machine tho.

  • All verstions of NT support FAT & NTFS and will allow different files systems on different volumes. FAT32 is supported by Win2K and XP.

    ÕÕ

  • Resource forks generally contain stuff such as executable code segments, pictures, icons, dialog-templates, alert-templates, sounds, menus, strings, configuration info, etc... In the case of an application: everything!

    Not anymore... all PPC native binaries (i.e. everything for the last several years) store their code in the data fork. The days of CODE resources are past, AFAICT. At least, I've never seen one in a recent program.

    All those other resource types are still there, though.
    --

  • Last I heard NTFS was broken in 2.4.x, I think reads would work, but writes would trash the filesystem. This may have changed - I know there were efforts to fix it in any case.
  • A 3rd party defrager like Disk Keeper [execsoft.com] can defrag the MFT. It used to be the case for quite a while that no one has this ability.
  • I know of a program called ntfsdos.exe which you can use to read ntfs partitions from dos. The only way to prevent someone from doing this and reading your _secure_ ntfs partition would be to disable boot from cdrom or floppy in the bios, so the person would not be able to get to dos and mount the ntfs partition.
  • Well, we used to solve that problem by having seperate admin consoles. WinXP disconnected desktops look like a solution too.

    Then again, I've worked in places where they've said "Oh, since you're contract Product X Administrator, we might as well give you NT DomainAdmin rights -- Here's your default IE setup that happy sends out your NT password hash to anyone that tricks you into sending a HTTP request..."

    Of course, just because *you're* domain/local admin, doesn't mean that FAT is a smart choice.
  • NTFS isn't the cure-all that MSFT makes it out to be. It has some problems.
    1. It allocates disk sectors in extents - therefore, it absolutely requires defragmentation. See Executive Software's Diskeeper benchmarks [executive.com], and their white paper [executive.com]. You don't have to believe Executive Software, and there may be good reasons for disbelieving them. Think about it: every other filesystem that has had extent-based allocation ended up with defragementers: DEC's ODS-2 (VMS), SGI's EFS (Irix) are two examples of radically different filesystems by radically different vendors, yet each required defragmentation. Fortunately, SGI provided such a good one, that 3rd party vendors didn't even bother.
    2. Each file has multiple "streams". These could very obviously promote security problems [indenial.com]. Alternatively, see this [securiteam.com] for another example. Microsoft itself has had a bunch of problems with NTFS streams, including bizarre interactions with IIS [microsoft.com].
    3. It's broken by design. Any fool can extend the MFT [securify.com] and use up all of a partition's disk space.
    If you insist on using a closed system, you don't get that many choices. For a lot of filesytem choices, I'd reccommend NetBSD [netbsd.org].

  • ... this is most likely for a home machine ... how many of NetBSD's multiple file systems are journalling and support ACL's?.

    Do I detect an internally-inconsistent argument from an MS apologist?

    Unix user IDs and permissions are far too restrictive for the home user, but the home user needs ACLs and a journalling filesystem. The goal is always just out of reach isn't it fudster?

    Ok, given that NetBSD uses FFS as its "native" filesystem, and FFS dates back to, what the early 80s, I'd say that it's had years of being proven through use, far more than NTFS has had. NetBSD also supports LFS, the log-structured filesystem. LFS doesn't need journalling: it is a journal. ACLs, I confess, seem to be beyond NetBSD. Other than that, I think your conclusion is dead wrong: if there's anything that open source operating systems are good for, it's a variety of filesystems.

  • >> Sorry, no; better luck next time.

    Sorry, but I stand by my statement, but I'll clarify it for you. Using "native" Windows NT Server "Services for Macintosh" (probably the most robust Mac file connectivity at the moment, but still far from great), you will retain resource forks on an NTFS partition but not on a FAT one.

    >>stick to file-sharing software that stores files using macbinary or binhex formats

    Are talking about DAVE or PC MacLan? Get real! Have you ever used these jokes? DAVE is flakey as heck, a pain in the butt to set up, you have to buy a copy for EACH Mac, and crashes often! PC MacLan is better, but uses Appletalk instead of TCP/IP, so it's slow as hell! Sure, they're ok for small shops, but in any "real" environment, using the NT Server services is the only way to go.

    NT Server has it's own issues, such as only showing a maximum of 4GB of disk space on any volume when seen on a Mac (unless you hack the registry), but it's not that bad overall.

    As for my explanation of resource forks: is it wrong? No. Is it incomplete? Yes. Was it meant to be a thesis of the underworkings of the Mac operating system? No. Go see my website [fuckaway.com] below.

    Before you start flaming someone, know what the heck you're talking about, and take into account the intended purpose and audience of the original message.

    MadCow.

  • Sorry... here's some info directly from the Microsoft knowledge base to support my claims.

    http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q 219/2/91.ASP [microsoft.com]

    MadCow.

  • good security but poor compatibility.

  • Depends on your needs/applications (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If you want to access the stuff on your filesystem from a non-MS operating system, you'll have to use FAT32 as MS keeps changing the journal data structures of NTFS to prevent a stable open-source driver.

    If you exclusively use MS operating systems, you should use NTFS for speed, stability, security, etc.

  • You don't have to format a drive or partition to switch from FAT to NTFS. NT and 2000 include a conversion program called, wait for it, convert.exe. The 2000 version works on FAT16 and FAT32.
  • No need to get all uptight!
    Of course with built-in NT services you cannot make a Mac share on a FATxx partition. The advantage of keeping resource forks integral to the file is that it is more easily recoverable should (now this never happens) NT and/or your Mac fileshare program takes a crap.
    You should take a deep breath and relax. Apply some of your ample free time to fruitful pursuits instead of flaming well-meaning posters. Either that, or go back to class!


    _damnit_
  • Uhh, you need to be using FAT-16 to have access from DOS. For FAT32 support you need win98 or better.

    It depends on what your purpose is, but honestly I think FAT32 gives you just about the same problems as NTFS does.

    Try to access a FAT32 partition from NT4.0 and you can't, for example.

    Oh, there are undelete utilities for NTFS, check out Executive Software. www.diskeeper.com

  • Well first I'll point out that on the Macintosh it used to do the same thing. i.e. stick a DOS floppy in and it'd ask you if you wanted to format it.

    This was back under System 6 or 7. But it was even more annoying than that, as it did have the capability of reading the DOS Floppy, but you had to run that utility before putting the floppy in the machine. If you didn't, and you didn't want to format the floppy it would eject it. It was really annoying if you didn't know about running that utility first. :)

    For office environments with both machines, Windows NT does provide Client Services for Macintosh. This is far more important, especially given most people really don't use floppies any longer, but instead share off the network.
  • I was enjoying reading the posts replying to this particular "Ask Slashdot", and learning stuff as well, until I got to your reply.

    I don't know anything about Macs and welcomed MadCow42's explanation of resource forks, 'cause as little as he might know on the subject, it's more than I do. You come along with your cute little analogies (actually they ain't bad) to bolster your claim that Mac users are deficient in technical knowledge and talents, but contributed nothing more to my understanding of the topic at hand. If his explanation of resource forks is wrong or inadequate, where's your better one?

    However, since I admire a well-crafted analogy as much as anybody, allow me to point out that any blind person presented with an automobile that would safely deliver them to their chosen destination without the need to depend upon any other person for assistance would probably be far too busy enjoying said vehicle to care about your opinion of their mechanical skills, and they probably wouldn't care much about the color of the car either.

  • No doubt you are experiencing unbounded joy at, contrary to your gloomy prediction, receiving exactly the moderation your post deserved.
  • WinNT's POSIX compliance support in NTFS is intended for use by applications running in the POSIX subsystem - this is a mode in which apps can't make Win32 calls, and incredibly limited, so it's virtually useless for real applications.

    The main purpose of the POSIX subsystem appears to have been to let NT meet government procurement specifications, rather than to enable real applications to be written. One result of this is that the various Unix emulation layers, such as Cygwin, are all implemented on the Win32 API, which does not have these limitations.
  • "And you wouldn't characterize the operating system volume as one that NEEDS ACLs? Basic rule of system integrity is to keep non-privleged programs and users out of there.

    Of course, 99 out of 100 NT admins I've known surf the web as Domain Administrator, so there you go. "

    ::Raises hand in shame::

    Well, more like sysadmin with too many Windows boxes on the side... and a need to run 2000 on the desktop.

    Now, for the *why*

    No decent su. The ResKit SU sucks, Win2K Run As isn't much better (read: it's not any better), and I've got to mangle with other systems so often as admin that there's nearly no point to me doing otherwise. In a more stable, happy, easily manageable network, I'd just su. In M$ land, you slowly learn to give up and just take over the whole damned network as Domain Admin.

    I hate Windows...


    Raptor
  • I'm wondering: with Windows XP would it be possible to have some partition in NTFS and another one in FAT32 in order to share informations between Linux and Windows (dual boot)?

    Does someone do this currently?
  • NTFS supports multiple streams in a file. See this page [biznix.org]. It looks like a generalization of the Mac's resource and data forks.
  • There is a program called ext2fsnt - although it's not free software. The original web site [ashedel.chat.ru] has a link to a new web site [partition-manager.com] where it's a commercial program ($14.95 read-only,$29.95 read-write).

    In it's previous form (the last download I had was v.04 - there's no release date but ext2.sys has a date of 10/25/1999) I had a lot of trouble with it, but I'd imagine now that it's a commercial program that's no longer an issue (or so I'd hope).

    Specifically it had problems displaying the files in directories which had an inode above a specific value. I don't remember what the specific value was, but it didn't strike me as being anything obvious (ie 2^15 or 2^31 for signed values).

    It also had a tendency to trash my ext2 volumes. I still have a large amount of mp3's which jump from one song to song within the mp3 because they were trashed... it's really quite annoying...

    Of course, what does one expect from version .04?
  • While NTFS may be faster at finding files (not by much, though), it is painfully slower at creating new files/folders becuase of the many writes it does to ensure consistencty. If you're a home user running games and other applications that won't benefit from the security or you don't need the compression, you will be pleasently surprised at the speed increase you get from a FAT32 volume. I'm guessing that since FAT32 isn't journaled/logged/whatevered it can make more efficient use of the write caching 2K does under the hood.

  • Just to corroborate, I've been running an NT4.0 system with the pagefile on a separate partition for ~3-1/2 yrs now. I had an install of W2K with the pagefile on a separate device, but that install has since been obliterated 8^)

    Diskeeper is better than nothing, but the full version is quite pricey for a home user...
    --
  • There are several utilities for accessing NTFS from dos.

    A quick searched revealed this product.

    http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfsd os pro.shtml

  • Sadly, this explanation has all the in-depth technical knowledge that is typical of Mac users everywhere.

    Sadly, this comment has all the sarcastic technical condescension that is typical of Slashdot readers everywhere.

    The guy gave a decent, functional, one line description of what a Mac resource file does. He was careful to say it "kind of" does what he's saying, but doesn't elaborate on details. You then give you sophomoric tirade against the guy for giving a superficial answer, and yet:

    • You don't actually know if he's as clueless as you indicate, and
    • You don't make any effort to fill in the blanks here, thus giving the impression that you are the hand-waving know-nothing here.

    If the guy's description of resource forks was really that bad, fine. If there's really a lot of important details to know, let's have them. I'd certainly like to be clued up on this one, being new to Macland and an emigrant from Unixland that am just coming over on HMS OSX.

    The beauty of Mac OS[0-9] was that they allowed a user to develop a sophisticated grasp of how to use the system, without burdening those users with having to learn details about what's going on under the hood. You could use OS9 the rest of your life, being extremely efficient & productive the whole time, and never once come across resource forks. That's beautiful.

    The beauty of Unix is that there is no hood, and everyone that uses it gets to see pretty much everything about how it works. You have no choice but to be an expert if you want to get anything done (like, say, cut & paste, or print a document, or play a cd, all of which involve insanely complex tinkering that would be inexcusable in Macland).

    The beauty of OSX is that there's a very pretty hood that is easily propped out of the way, allowing the more ambitious users to tinker around just like the old Unix nerds. Best of both worlds. You can skim along the surface and never learn about, say, a plist file or hell a tcsh prompt, or you can dig in to your heart's contentment. Everyone's happy.

    The point is, neither way is "better". If having to spend hours getting your GUI up & running is your idea of a good time, great, have at it. But it's a bit crazy to condescend others that would rather put their effort into actually getting things done with an up & running system, as millions of old school Macland people have been doing for years now, just because you happen to know how the bits get flipped in the background.

    Guess what? No one cares! The nice engineers went out of their way to make it so that no one has to care, so please don't slap all those people in the face for their supposed ignorance. It isn't ignorance. It's indifference. There are more interesting things to think about.

  • You can not access NTFS disks from DOS or Win9x.

    A cow-orker and I were discussing this just yesterday, actually. How come MS makes it so hard to work with "wrong" filesystems?

    For example, MS seems pretty comfortable with the idea that there are a lot of offices that run both Windows and Macintosh computers, and as long as they can sell software for both sides, this doesn't seem to bother them. And yet, try to put a Mac formatted floppy in your Win98 box and you'll be cheerfully informed that "this disc is not formatted, would you like to format it now? [y/n]". How hard could it be to just have Mac filesystem drivers available for Windows, even optionally. [Pleading ignorance -- it's possible that such a thing exists and I just don't know about it...].

    That was the discussion yesterday. This example works even better. As common as heterogeneous Win/Mac offices are, heterogeneous Win9x/NT offices are surely much more common. And yet again the same problem comes up. It's not bad to move from 9x -> NT, but why not the other way? Isn't it in their interests to support this market?

    Of course, the standard response at this point would be something like "yeah, well, if it was open source then we wouldn't have to wait for them to provide it." Fair enough, but not really the point. They aren't open source, they're not providing it, and yet there is a need for it. It seems that their solution, rather than accomodating the users' current needs, is to drive them all into the burden of 'upgrading' to the more resource hungry NT line. *sigh*

    From Linux the read/write access to files on NTFS partitions is not as reliable as FAT/32. The NTFS driver is still in "experimental" stage (At least in kernel 2.2.x, I didn't check 2.4.x). If you don't use Linux, this is not a problem.

    One solution would be to consider multiple partitions. Your C: drive can be NTFS, and is the home of the system files & major applications. A D: drive can be FAT32, storing data and other applications. (Then you give the other half of the hard drive over to Linux &/or BeOS... :). One benefit of this is that whenever you listen to someone's "I don't understand that registry thing you're talking about, but I tried this and it was drastic but it worked for me" advice to reformat & reinstall Windows, you can be reasonably secure in knowing that your data and programs are safe elsewhere. The FAT partition acts a common area, accessible to any operating system available, and as noted you can use any DOS applications that would barf on an NTFS partition.

    This is basically the setup I use on my computer at work. I divided the drive in thirds, giving the first slice to NT on NTFS, the second to a FAT32 partition, and the third for BeOS. Both OSes get full read-write access to 2/3 of the hard drive, which seems like a reasonable compromise to me. It's a compromise that sacrifices full use of some of the neat properties of both NTFS and BFS, but it seems like an optimal use of resources.

  • Utilities do exist for Mac disks to be read in Windows machines. I don't know if any of them are much good, I generally use the HFS utilities in Linux when I need to mess with mac files. I do know that PC drives generally cant read 800k Mac disks, something about the track size.

    When dealing with exchanging data in a mixed environment I generally use a network file server that knows how to talk to everyone on the network. Linux works fine for this, you run nfsd to talk to the *nix boxen, samba to talk to the windows machines and atalkd to talk to the Macs. If you need to use sneakernet you just have to use FAT formatted media. Pretty much every operating system I've ever run across can read FAT16 disks/memory cards/digital cameras/USB dongles/etc. If you need to sneakernet more than a few megs at a time, use .iso CDs. Pretty much everyone can read those too.

    ________________________

  • "POSIX Compliance

    If you want POSIX compliance, you must use NTFS. POSIX compliance permits UNIX programs to be ported to Windows 2000. Windows 2000 is fully compliant with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) standard 1003.1, which is a standard for file naming and identification.

    The following POSIX-compliant features are included in NTFS:

    Case-sensitive naming. For example, POSIX would interpret README.TXT, Readme.txt, and readme.txt as different files. "

    Hmm. I think that you are being over complementary of windows 2000's POSIX compliance.
    I work in a lab where we have win2k and linux side by side. Windows 2000 causes me no end of problems by not recognising (for example) Readme.txt and readme.txt as two different files when transfering files around / creating CD iso images.

    I'm not saying that FAT32 is any better (it isn't) but I think that saying win2k is fully POSIX compliant is misleading.

  • If you want to know more about filesystems, a very good book is Practical Filesystem Design with the Be Filesystem [amazon.com] by Dominic Giampaolo, ISBN: 1558604979

    Dominic is the designer and implementor of the BeOS BFS filesystem, a multithreaded journaled 64-bit filesystem that supports indexed file attributes.

    In the beginning of the book there is some good discussion comparing and contrasting various filesystems, including what is publicly known about NTFS. Other filesystems discussed include BSD's FFS, Linux ext2, Mac OS HFS and Silicon Graphics XFS. He also discusses some of the basics of designing any filesystem, the general approaches taken towards filesystem design, and discusses the BFS in depth. It discusses much more modern and advanced topics in filesystem design than are covered in most operating system texts, like journaling and accessing the filesystem from a multithreaded kernel.

    By "attributes" I mean extra chunks of data that live outside the main data sequence, and are used for such things as denoting the MIME-type of the file in the filesystem. By "indexed" I mean that an application can tell the OS that it wants indices created for particular attributes, and then applications can do boolean queries on the attributes and get the responses quickly.

    There is a linux version of the BFS filesystem available as a patch - it is not yet in the main kernel tree, and I believe it is read-only. It is complicated to make it writeable because it is a journaled filesystem. You can get it here [milosch.net].

    To try out the Be filesystem fully, get the free-as-in beer version of the BeOS from http://free.be.com/ [be.com] to install under Windows or ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/beos/ [be.com] to get the version you can install under Linux. The BeOS personal edition creates a virtual filesystem within a regular file on FAT or ext2.

    If you have a partition to spare, much recommended is BeOS 5 Pro which you can inexpensively purchase from Gobe Software [gobe.com]. The Pro version can also do symmetric multiprocessing.

    Mike


    Mike [goingware.com]

  • Actually, you can access NTFS partitions from Win9x with NTFS for Windows 98 [sysinternals.com].

    The free version is read-only, they also offer a read-write version for purchase.

  • Let's get the facts straight..

    Mac files are composed of two forks, resource and data. In pc-world only the latter one exists. For most things that are not executable (documents, pictures, etc..) mac and pc-versions of that file would be equal.

    Resource fork is, when put in slashdot terms: a database of records grouped by a four letter identifier and id-number. That four letter code marks the type and id, well it's an id.

    Resource forks generally contain stuff such as executable code segments, pictures, icons, dialog-templates, alert-templates, sounds, menus, strings, configuration info, etc... In the case of an application: everything!

    Why is this a good idea: Easy access from code (don't need to worry about a location for some sounds/pictures), everything contained in a single place and it is very modifiable. Want to translate the menus (and just about everything else textual) into swahili.. Sure, go ahead and launch resedit..

    I'm very doubtfull of ntfs natively supporting dual-forks. Generally copying macfiles into foreign file-systems has required some sort of encoding before writing the data. Generally this encoding is called macbinary, which happens to be just about the same format that mac-files are saved even on macs. Filesystem access routines(on a mac) just now about the file-info-block and where resources start and data ends.. Write all this info in one chunk on a pc and your file is very safe.

    And your analogy is totally wrong! Resource-fork doesn't have anything to do with file identification. This information is stored in the file information block at the filesystem level. Files without resources-forks can have type information without silly three-letter suffixes.

  • Yeah.. my info might be a little old since last I programmed with macs was when ppc-stuff was coming out. All I did was 68k.. Could be that the old ppc-compilers did use code resources, though.. To my recollection application execution was started(way back) by loading up a specific code-resource..
  • hahaha, straight off the MSDN, eh?

    someone explain to me why ntfs, which is a journalled filesystem, takes so long to run chkdsk after an 'abnormal' (well, normal for NT) system halt? it should be able to just replay the log to restore the drive's metadata to a consistent state. Instead, it takes as long or longer than chkdsk on a FAT filesystem.

    also interesting how little details, like the fact that MFT continues to grow, and can't be defragmented and lost filespace recovered, are left out. NTFS sucks. get a real filesystem.

  • they both have the disadvantage of being file systems you'd use for windows, but prejudices aside, here's my understanding of the chied differences:

    Security. It's my understanding that you cannot compromise NTFS simply by rebooting with a boot disk. FAT32 is allegedly vulnerable to this.

    Access. I'm not aware of any NTFS drivers for Linux. So, if you want to setup a dual-boot system, you wouldn't be able access your NTFS partition while in Linux.

    For more information, here [microsoft.com]'s a link to a comparison in the Microsoft knowledge base.

    --
  • Just to further clarify, you can put the page file on several seperate partitions, and as long as the pagefile on your root partition is big enough, you'll get coredump functionality. Being able to spread your pagefile across multiple spindles is nice.
  • This [swin.edu.au] is a utility that lets you read ext2fs partitions from NT/2000. I haven't heard of an actual filesystem driver that does this for Windows - but it would come in very handy...
  • ntfs = servers, preferably on volumes that NEED it

    And you wouldn't characterize the operating system volume as one that NEEDS ACLs? Basic rule of system integrity is to keep non-privleged programs and users out of there.

    Of course, 99 out of 100 NT admins I've known surf the web as Domain Administrator, so there you go.

    a DOS boot disk, \WINNT\SYSTEM32\ and replace crap dll

    The ability to do this is highly overrated, in my practical expeience. Plus, now you've got SFP. Much more likely that you need to mount the registry to fix some boot problem, and that means having a parallel install any way you cut it.

    fat32 is faster, ntfs is a crock of shit. .

    I've never seen a FAT/FAT32 install that didn't eventually corrupt it's registry. The shit is 80s era unreliable crap. Don't use it.
  • Access. I'm not aware of any NTFS drivers for Linux. So, if you want to setup a dual-boot system, you wouldn't be able access your NTFS partition while in Linux.

    Well, it can be mounted read-only, which has saved me several times when an NT/2000 machine went down. Mount it up -o ro, tar cf /home/freespace/nt.tar /nt/*, and away you go.

    What I'd really love to see is the reverse: ext2 and reiserfs support in NT/2000. Does anyone see it happening anytime soon -- or is it around already?
    Thus sprach DrQu+xum.
  • And don't forget:

    "Macintosh" files saved on an NTFS volume will retain their resourse forks, whereas if they're saved on a FAT16/32 volume the resource forks will be lost.

    Not important to many home users, but in any Mac/Windows shared network, this is VERY important... Mac files that have lost their resource forks are a pain in the butt to deal with, and are often useless without a lot of manual hacking of the file using something like "ResEdit".

    FYI, resource forks on Mac are "kind of" the Mac equivalent of the three character extension on DOS files. They're used to tell the OS what kind of file it is, what application can be used to run it, etc.

    MadCow.

  • Why look further than security? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 02, 2001 @04:20PM (#249772)
    I will not bother to poste a link to any page but the simple comparison of the following feature puts me FIRMLY in the NTFS crowd.

    NTFS supports account based access control to directories and files. FAT32 does not.

  • What does MCSE stand for? (Score:3)

    by emc ( 19333 ) on Wednesday May 02, 2001 @11:23PM (#249773)
    Must Consult Someone Experienced

  • BS, FreeBSD has had a stable NTFS Driver... (Score:3)

    by keepper ( 24317 ) on Wednesday May 02, 2001 @11:24PM (#249774) Homepage
    and it has had one for over a year...

    :-P
    FUD
  • Yes, there is a Linux driver for NTFS. In kernel 2.4.4, it's marked EXPERIMENTAL and DANGEROUS. It can read NTFS files, but when writing it corrupts the disk (the structure of the journal entries is protected by a NDA). You must unmount the disk in Linux, and run a utility which will force NT to run chkdsk to add the journal entries.

    Not really the best solution...

  • NTFS Benefits (Score:3)

    by duplicate-nickname ( 87112 ) on Wednesday May 02, 2001 @05:48PM (#249776) Homepage
    Here you go:

    Security by ACL's

    File access auditing

    Logging file system => consistent data => no need to every run a "scandisk" application

    File & Folder compression

    Encrypted File System

    Less fragmentation: NTFS will write small files directly into the MFT, or if a small file is too big to fit in the MFT it will try and write it close to the MFT to reduce head movement

    Smaller blocks and supports partitions up to 2 exabytes

    Reparse points, which are like unix symbolic links

    Reasons to use FAT:

    Need to access FS from another OS that doesn't support NTFS

    Less overhead on small partitions, by small I mean

    Unless you're dual booting, there is no reason to use FAT32!!

    ÕÕ

  • Re:Advantages of NTFS (Score:3)

    by rakslice ( 90330 ) on Wednesday May 02, 2001 @10:24PM (#249777) Homepage Journal
    >"Macintosh" files saved on an NTFS volume will retain their resourse forks, whereas if they're saved on a FAT16/32 volume the resource forks will be lost.

    Sorry, no; better luck next time. The resource fork integrity depends wholly on how you're getting the split-format files to and from the volume -- most available mac-compatible file sharing software will put dual-fork files on single-fork filesystems without complaint.

    Generally you should stick to file-sharing software that stores files using macbinary or binhex formats, or that uses secondary (usually hidden) resource fork files (this is how Apple's PC Exchange stores them on FAT ["DOS-format"] disks).

    >FYI, resource forks on Mac are "kind of" the Mac equivalent of the three character extension on DOS files. They're used to tell the OS what kind of file it is, what application can be used to run it, etc.

    Heh. Sadly, this explanation has all the in-depth technical knowledge that is typical of Mac users everywhere. =)

    For you innocent Mac users who don't know what I'm getting at:

    I'm far likely to get this definition --

    "The gasoline combustion engine is a noise-making device, installed in cars primarily to signal to any blind pedestrians who may be trying to cross the road up ahead that it might be a bad idea to do so right now."

    -- from a blind non-mechanic pedestrian than from anyone else. If you think about it, from the point of view of our theoretical blind non-mechanic pedestrian (whom we will call Theo for short), this definition might be essentially complete.

    Now, imagine that Theo decides to acquire an Apple iCar(tm), a miraculous conveyance that can drive from point A to any other point with only a single voice command from the owner, and is available in any colour of the (fluorescent plastic) rainbow...

    [Have a Great Day!] -aT

    -aT

  • Which applications? (Score:3)

    by yamla ( 136560 ) <chris@@@hypocrite...org> on Wednesday May 02, 2001 @06:23PM (#249778)
    If you are only planning on using Windows XP (or Windows 2000), your choice is made. NTFS. It is a journalling filesystem in pretty much the same way ReiserFS is. That is, the meta-data is journalled. NTFS is, technically, a much better file system.

    On the other hand, if you are going to dual-boot your system (with Windows 9x or ME or Linux or most of the xBSDs), you'll want FAT32. At least for the data that you want to share. There's far better third-party support for FAT32.

    That also means you might want to consider FAT32 if you run other applications. Norton Utilities, for example, that kind of thing. Though you'd probably need the XP version anyway.

    So in summary... go for NTFS if you will use Windows NT (i.e. NT, 2K, or XP) only. If you want to run other operating systems and share data, go for FAT32.

    --

  • NTFS = HPFS; FAT32=FAT16=FAT12=Junk (Score:4)

    by nbvb ( 32836 ) on Wednesday May 02, 2001 @05:16PM (#249779) Journal
    Sure, there are lots of reasons to use NTFS instead of FATxx.

    NTFS is a decendant of HPFS which was OS/2's High Performance File System. HPFS is a full hierarchical filesystem, and provides native support for things like real file names, etc. It's b-tree based, so things like directory listing are automatically sorted. Other nifties like filesystem checks take a LOT less time.

    FAT32 is simply an extension of FAT16 which was itself an extension of FAT12, which was a 160k floppy disk filesystem. It's a darned mess. Filename support besides 8.3 is STILL a joke. FAT isn't optimized for anything. It was designed to be used on small floppies where organization doesn't matter. Hell, it wasn't even originally designed to support subdirectories! Remember, FAT stands for (F)ile (A)llocation (T)able -- and that's exactly what it is. Simply a list of filenames and their physical location on disk.

    I'd use NTFS. I haven't kept up with things since the OS/2 Warp 3 days, but simple filesystem design hasn't changed. FAT's a bit of throwaway code that should have been ditched 20 years ago.

    --dmurphy

    p.s. I haven't even taken into account things like security features, POSIX compliance, etc...

  • Advantages of NTFS (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 02, 2001 @04:38PM (#249780)

    RecoverabilityThe recoverability designed into NTFS is such that a user should seldom have to run a disk repair program on an NTFS volume. NTFS guarantees the consistency of the volume by using standard transaction logging and recovery techniques. In the event of a system failure, NTFS uses its log file and checkpoint information to automatically restore the consistency of the file system.

    CompressionWindows2000 supports compression on an individual file basis for NTFS volumes. Files that are compressed on an NTFS volume can be read and written by any Windows-based application without first being decompressed by another program. Decompression happens automatically during the read of the file. The file is compressed again when it is closed or saved.

    In addition, formatting your volumes with NTFS instead of FAT16 or FAT32 provides the following advantages:

    • There are some Windows2000 operating system features that require NTFS.
    • Faster access speed. NTFS minimizes the number of disk accesses required to find a file.
    • File and folder security. On NTFS volumes, you can set file permissions on files and folders that specify which groups and users have access to them, and what level of access is permitted. NTFS file and folder permissions apply both to users working at the computer where the file is stored and to users accessing the file over the network when the file is in a shared folder. With NTFS you can also set share permissions that operate on shared folders in combination with file and folder permissions.
    • Windows2000 can format volumes up to 2terabytes in size with NTFS.
    • The boot sector is backed up to a sector at the end of the volume.
    • NTFS supports a native encryption system called Encrypting File System (EFS), using public-key security to prevent unauthorized access to file contents.
    • NTFS functionality can be extended by using reparse points, enabling new features such as volume mount points.
    • Disk quotas can be set, limiting the amount of space users can consume on an NTFS volume.
    • Multiple Data Streams.
    POSIX Compliance

    If you want POSIX compliance, you must use NTFS. POSIX compliance permits UNIX programs to be ported to Windows2000. Windows2000 is fully compliant with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) standard 1003.1, which is a standard for file naming and identification.

    The following POSIX-compliant features are included in NTFS:

    • Case-sensitive naming. For example, POSIX would interpret README.TXT, Readme.txt, and readme.txt as different files.
    • Hard links. A file can be given more than one name. This allows two different file names, which can be located in different folders, to point to the same data.
    • Additional time stamps. These show when the file was last accessed or modified.

  • The Disadvantages (Score:5)

    by DVega ( 211997 ) on Wednesday May 02, 2001 @05:40PM (#249781)

    There were some posts talking about the advantages. Now the disadvantages. (At least the ones I know)

    You can not access NTFS disks from DOS or Win9x. If you have any programs that don't run on WinNT (eg. some DOS games) you will be unable to run those programs, unless you also have a FAT/32 (FAT or FAT32) partition.

    If you create a FAT/32 partition in orther to dual boot, you will be unable to access the files on the NTFS partition when you boot from the FAT/32 partition.

    From Linux the read/write access to files on NTFS partitions is not as reliable as FAT/32. The NTFS driver is still in "experimental" stage (At least in kernel 2.2.x, I didn't check 2.4.x). If you don't use Linux, this is not a problem.

    I don't know if there are any undelete utilities for NTFS.

    Nevertheless, I think NTFS is a good choice if you use WinNT (or any variant).

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