[poochie]

Do games load faster in FAT 32? When I recently formatted my hard drive and installed XP, a friend who does a lot of gaming advised that I format in FAT 32. He claims that games will load quicker due to the files not having to be decompressed. Is that right? I have the option of changing to NTFS. Is it worth it?

 

[johnwill]

There will be no significant difference. However, if you use the XP conversion utility to convert FAT32 to NTFS, there WILL be a difference, it'll be much SLOWER! The reason is that the conversion utility, due to an obscure disk block alignment issue, will create 512 byte clusters on the NTFS volume. This is a significant performance issue. There is a work-around for the XP/W2K conversion utility, and you can use something like Partition Magic that doesn't have this problem. OTOH, unless you feel a burning need for NTFS, I'd just leave it alone.

 

[diamondxl]

johnwill-on that note, u know of any _good_ conversion utilities? i have fat32 on my laptop and in order for me to run vc++ i need to switch to ntfs (arrrg i hate ms stupidities)

 

[johnwill]

Why do you need NTFS to run VC? I run VC6 on this system, it's FAT32 dual boot MS-DOS/W2K. I can't imagine why they'd insist on NTFS for a software development package!

 

[beefheart]

About the Windows conversion utility, if I already ran it and changed to NTFS, what's the best way to go back to FAT32?

 

[Drupy]

You can change from FAT 32 to NTFS but you CAN NOT change from NTFS to FAT 32.

 

[johnwill]

Sure you can go back, you need Partition Magic, I've done both conversions a number of times. I believe you can also adjust the cluster sizes of your NTFS with PM too, though I've never tried it.

 

[beefheart]

Using PM 8.0, I tried to change my cluster size. I got error 1513. I did chkdsk /f, defragged, still got error 1513. On a whim, I tried to convert back to FAT32, same error. I can't figure out why this would happen. Anyone have any ideas?

Here's a link to PowerQuest's website about this error.
http://www.powerquest.com/support/primus/id963.cfm

 

[johnwill]

Don't know, never had that happen.

 

[Drupy]

Sure you can go back, you need Partition Magic, I've done both conversions a number of times. I believe you can also adjust the cluster sizes of your NTFS with PM too, though I've never tried it.

Now think about this if you convert from FAT 32 to NTFS and save data while running in NTFS then (if it really is poss.) convert it back to FAT 32 (which to me is a waste) any data written in NTFS will be lost. NTFS can read FAT32 however FAT32 cannot 100% read NTFS. Now I know Microsoft has software that allows the two to read each other's data it's just not a smart move and on a little different note if your chancing these conversions on your network for any reason I think it's alittle risky and just plain dumb.