Ntfs Or Fat For My Stuff?

[HyBriD54 0]

I'm dual-booting Windows and Ubuntu. My HD has 3 partitions, one for each operating system and the third partition for my stuff. The Windows partition is formatted as NTFS, and the Ubuntu partition is formatted as ext2.I formatted the third partition as FAT32 because when I first set up this system, Ubuntu couldn't read from/write to NTFS partitions easily. But now that Ubuntu can supposedly handle NTFS, should I move all my stuff off the HD, reformat the third partition as NTFS, and put everything back on?Would this have any huge advantage over having my stuff stored in a FAT32 partition, and will doing this make it harder for Ubuntu to handle my files?

[xpress 0]

No need to change to NTFS. You can work with FAT32. There are no big advantages if you move from FAT32 to NTFS.They both works as same. One advantage of NTFS is it doesn't have Partition size limitation, where as in FAT32 you can have only 32GB partition. NTFS is somewhat secure. If you want to compress your disk or allow disk quota you have to go to NTFS. But as a home user, they are meaningless to you.

[saitunes 0]

Fat you can't have files bigger then 4gb (I think) OR so I discovered with my portable hard drive going between mac and windows.I'm not sure if its just with mac.

[xpress 0]

Yes. The Maximum file size for FAT32 is 4GB(It is a single file size, not the partition size. Max partition size is 32GB). But I don't think you'll never need a file that is larger than 4GB. But of course, if you don't like these limits, you can go for NTFS. By The Way, I don't know anything about Mac.

[Saint_Michael 3]

You definately want to use a NTFS because of the size restricts of a FAT especially if you want to set up a RAID to your computer your would better off with NTFS because you be able spread out larger files without the need make thousands of files and folders in order to put them together and what not.

[iGuest 3]

Hi,

  FAT fileystem are of two types. FAT 16 and FAT32.

FAT16 file system cannot support a partition of morethan 2 GB. Bt FAT 32 is capable of supporting a harddrive of morethan 2 TB. 

 

Regs.

 

 

[rayzoredge 2]

Er, you can support more than 32GB with FAT32. I know because I have a 500GB hard drive formatted with the FAT32 filesystem to get it to work with my Xbox 360.You just gotta use the right tools... *coughGPartedcough*

[rpgsearcherz 5]

I use NTFS solely because of the file size limit on FAT32. My understanding is that Fat32 is much more efficient though in terms of the way it works (as far as I know it works kind of like Linux does, where it doesn't get fragmented). That's what I read online a while back at least.

[jlhaslip 4]

Linux Ubuntu 9.10 offers ext4 file types which eliminates a lot of the issues you are discussing, ie: file sizes.
What I don't know is whether Windows can read/use that format?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Linux Ubuntu 9.10 offers ext4 file types which eliminates a lot of the issues you are discussing, ie: file sizes. What I don't know is whether Windows can read/use that format?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4

As far as I know it can't read any of the Ext. formatted drives (even Ext3) but Linux can read the Windows formats (such as NTFS/Fat32).

There were some programs that can supposedly read the Ext formats on Windows but I've yet to get any to work.

[truefusion 3]

What I don't know is whether Windows can read/use that format?

It can read it if you install the drivers for it like i did; however, writing to it may be a different story. Now-a-days, using just about any ext2 driver won't work since many of the popular distros increased the inode size to 256. The one i use is Ext2Fsd. Works well enough for me.