FAT32 or NTFS?

[Hai Perso Coyone?]

Okay, so I am in a bit of a dilemma here...All my music, games, and everything else is on my FAT32 drive...Now, I really wanna install FSX but I heard it doesn't install on FAT32...well it does, but hangs after 4GB...Now, I don't wanna lose all my data...I only have 38GB left on my other HDD...What shall I do?

[NicksFXHouse]

You should have been on NTFS years ago

FAT32 went out with Windows98SE

Windows runs better and is 100x more secure on NTFS not to mention the partition size advantages.


If you read somewhere it was better to run WindowsXP on FAT32... what you read was written by a clueless idiot that is stuck in the late 90's for fear of innovation and change.... which is typically where those performance articles about FAT32 being better than NTFS came from.


Another rumor... moving the swap file to a different drive on a FAT32 partition was true back when Windows95/98 were around and hardware was slower than molasses on January morning in Fairbanks Alaska, but that was the last period of time when FAT32 had any performance or other advantages.


NTFS

[Gunny04]

You could always get some disks and start burning, or just install the most important stuff on the 38 gigs left and go along with that. And yep, FS Stalled out on my Fat32 drive (why this PC had a FAT32 partition I'll never understand)

Cheers, Gunny

[legoalex2000]

not to  mention that with NTFS you can read files off of both vista and XP. and the ecurity encryption is good, whereas there is none at all on FAT.

ramos

[NicksFXHouse]

Okay, so I am in a bit of a dilemma here...All my music, games, and everything else is on my FAT32 drive...Now, I really wanna install FSX but I heard it doesn't install on FAT32...well it does, but hangs after 4GB...Now, I don't wanna lose all my data...I only have 38GB left on my other HDD...What shall I do?

You need a bigger hard drive... the size of what you have left over minus FSX install is going to leave you very little space for the MFT zone and page file. Although it will run the disk performance will be greatly reduced because of how much you have on the drive.

Rule of thumb is to try and keep a hard drive 1/2 empty or better. 2/3 full is the absolute most I would run before buying a new drive