Fat32 faster than NTFS on partitions smaller than 60Gb?

[alex]

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

I've read on a couple of articles that FAT32 is faster than NTFS on
partitions smaller than 60 or so Gigabytes. Apparently FAT32 isn't
hindered by security issues and indexes which are part of NTFS.

I am about to create a small FAT32 partition (10Gb) for audio
applications only and another one (60Gb) for Audio files on another
hard disk.
As the two partitions need to be both FAT32 (as NTFS isn't read from
older file systems) it seems that I wouldn't be able to set the
clusters size to 64k (ideal for Wav files).

It seems to me that I am probably going to loose the speed advantage
offered by the FAT32 filesystem as I would have to settle for 32k
clusters.

Anyone knows better?

Thanks for any suggestion.

Alex.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

Alex wrote:

> I've read on a couple of articles that FAT32 is faster than NTFS on
> partitions smaller than 60 or so Gigabytes. Apparently FAT32 isn't
> hindered by security issues and indexes which are part of NTFS.

Faster for what? Creating files? Writing to files? Reading files?
Finding files by searching through directories? Random access
performance? Sequential performance? Locating the disk blocks
associated with the middle of a large file?

Each filesystem has its strong points and weak points. Some
perform well in one area and badly in another. So, by itself,
"FAT32 is faster than NTFS" is very likely a meaningless statement,
unless it just so happens that it's faster at absolutely everything.

Also, regarding cluster sizes, I'm pretty sure NTFS is an extent-based
filesystem. So, cluster size is in effect not important. If you
tell the OS you have 1 MB of data to write, it can allocate (provided
it's available) one big 1 MB chunk of space to write to, instead of
having to break that up into clusters. Still, on a disk that's not
very fragmented, it doesn't make much difference: either filesystem
can write all the data to contiguous disk space, and the only
difference is that FAT has to record a big long list of clusters
that it wrote to, whereas NTFS can just record that it wrote 1 MB
of data starting at cluster number whatever.

Unfortunately, filesystem perform is pretty complex. The best
bet would be to try out the two main configurations you're
considering, run some kind of disk benchmark, and pay special
attention to the tests of sequential performance that it does.

- Logan

 

[alex]

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

Logan Shaw <lshaw-usenet@austin.rr.com> wrote in message news:<_kRRd.12728$cW2.6653@fe2.texas.rr.com>...
> Alex wrote:
>
> > I've read on a couple of articles that FAT32 is faster than NTFS on
> > partitions smaller than 60 or so Gigabytes. Apparently FAT32 isn't
> > hindered by security issues and indexes which are part of NTFS.
>
> Faster for what? Creating files? Writing to files? Reading files?
> Finding files by searching through directories? Random access
> performance? Sequential performance? Locating the disk blocks
> associated with the middle of a large file?
>
>
Faster write and read performances...I don't have the article handy at
the moment but I can find out.
NTFS are loaded of safety codings which are a blessing for networks
and internet but aren't of any use to many musicians.

I am not an expert, but as I understood, the less a file is
"clustered", the less reads and therefore a speedier the transfer,
this is why NTFS offer a certain advantage over FAT32 which cluster
size is determinded by the size of the partition itself...
So it seems that even if FAT32 offer faster reads/writes it doesn't
offer big clusters...i.e. maybe it is still better to stick to NTFS.

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

Alex wrote:
> Logan Shaw <lshaw-usenet@austin.rr.com> wrote in message news:<_kRRd.12728$cW2.6653@fe2.texas.rr.com>...
>
>> Alex wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I've read on a couple of articles that FAT32 is faster than NTFS on
>>> partitions smaller than 60 or so Gigabytes. Apparently FAT32 isn't
>>> hindered by security issues and indexes which are part of NTFS.
>>
>> Faster for what? Creating files? Writing to files? Reading files?
>> Finding files by searching through directories? Random access
>> performance? Sequential performance? Locating the disk blocks
>> associated with the middle of a large file?
>
>
> Faster write and read performances.

Perhaps, a little bit. As I mentioned above, it's not enough to limit what you can do with a modern machine.




> NTFS are loaded of safety codings which are a blessing for networks
> and internet but aren't of any use to many musicians.

Unless those musicians care about losing their recordings due to a crash.