Ed,

When I upgrade to W2K and my 20GB drive I'll be starting from scratch. Jerry tells me that I could fire up with a W98 boot floppy if I had Fat32 but not with NTFS, which he says leaves me unrecoverable after a big crash. This is my home machine so security is less important than for some other people.

But I'm thinking the answer to that is having a good backup. I'll probably be doing that by copying to the smaller drive (Fat32) each night for now.

Advice?


>>In the "SCSI or ATA" thread I picked the FAT32 version of Win 2000 Pro SP1.
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>>Does anyone think I really should go with NTFS?
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>I do; NTFS offers better granularity of access control, uses a smaller unit of allocation, is more robust. There are a few things under Win2K that require the use of NTFS. It outperforms FAT under random access - FAT is faster doing sequential I/O moving forward in a file; FAT uses a single linked list data structure to manage directories and tracking file allocation where NTFS implements a tree structured double linked list. Swap files on FAT perform marginally better than on NTFS, but the difference in performance there is negligible. If you dual boot the system, something I don't recommend, Win9x can read/write FAT partitions; you'd need a third party driver to access a local NTFS volume; Win95 OSR 2/Win98/ME can directly access a FAT volume.
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>You can always set up one drive NTFS and the other FAT32 and do some benchmark testing if that worries you.
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>I use NTFS whenever it's available as a choice. I use FAT16 on my 1GB Jaz cartridges. If you start using FAT and later decide to switch to NTFS it can be done without reformatting and reinstalling; once you switch to NTFS, the only way to convert it back to FAT is reformatting, or the use of a third-party product like Partition Magic.