Has anybody grinded a full set of music with say 1 hour of none stop mixing with both NTFS vs. Fat32. This might be geared more to the QA team at Rane. Is there a performance difference that you guy's can recognize. What is the harddrive format do you guys recommend NTFS or Fat32? I know NTFS does better on the file storing as far as giving you more space then Fat32. But speed wise, does SSL perform better? Hope this is clear enough. Maybe there's no difference.

I use NTFS both on my internal and external HD. No problems...

Im using NTFS on an external drive...only drawback I saw was when a buddy of mine came over with his mac.....no go....which is not such a huge deal

NTFS

NTFS is better concerning safety, it is a journal based filesystem, which are more robust against crashes. FAT32 files can be seriously damaged if a FS error occurs, I had this many times. Esp with FS1 and its linux implementation, crashes, and messed my FAT32 partition. But this also could be due to a buggy FAT32 linux driver used by FS1, not sure. Anyway, bottom line, NTFS is better when it comes to stability. Dont know if there are big differences in efficiency compared to FAT32 (besides the limitation of file sizes ,FAT32 cant hold files larger than 2GB)).

Journal FS : www.surasoft.com <- click.

ntfs is much more efficient on large drives. FAT32 has to use huge clusters to stop the FAT getting to big (I was tempted to say fat). NTFS doesn't suffer from this problem and can use more sensible <4k clusters even on very large disks.

Not larger files than 2 Gb on FAT´32? I have a 17 Gb file stored on a FAT32 partition. I've always heard that NTFS is faster but FAT32 is safer. But I might have got it all wrong!?

Strange, I always thought 2GB is the magic limit, anyway, it is 4GB (according to MS... they should know... I assume, haha), read here www.microsoft.com <-click. There is also a link on the left titled "Advantages of NTFS"

2 GB is the limit of FAT16

Josh, funny, but check that link from MS. They state something different. I am confused, but its not that important with me, I try to use NTFS where I can.

oh right, it's 4GB under XP... not that anyone would use it under XP.

4GB is definatley the limit for a file on a FAT filesystem this is because it's 2^32 bytes. This was always a big problem when trying to do video editing on a windows 98 PC. You couldn't create a DV file longer than 20 minutes. FAT32 is not at all safe, it can currupt files when the operating system crashes and provides no file permissions or other security.
You are best off using FAT16 on small drives (like memory sticks) providing you don't need security and NTFS on anything larger than 1GB.

so.... if i using FAT32, how can i convert to NTFS,
do u guys know any software like that? Thx!!

Open a commandbox, enter "convert /?", thats a good starting point :-) (does not work on Win98)

yes, i found that, thx!! support.microsoft.com

full command is
convert c: /fs:ntfs
substitute c with the drive you want to convert, on a side note. If you have a copy it's worth using partition magic to do the conversion otherwise your clusters will be set to 512bytes. If you don't have partition magic but you do have space to back up all the files I would copy everything off, reformat and copy it all back.

I had done the first test, but seem like the system run a
little bit slower that b4 after the convertion. ??????

You'll probably find a converted ntfs partition is a bit slower than it's fat counterpart, but it's so much safer and faster on things like file searches, that it's not worth risking using fat. Also some speed can probably be regained by resizing your clusters. I think 2k usually works best.

I forgot to say, check whether or not your indexing service is running on the newly converted drive. This can cause a big slow down whilst it makes it's inital pass of the drive.

thx, i checked that!! and thx for the details. ;-)