At 07:28 PM 5/30/2001 -0400, Brian Guralnick wrote:
>One last thing on #2, Win2K has a better & faster & secure file system
>called NTFS. It which supports files larger than 1GB. Instead of
>compressing the drive, individual folders may have compression on, or
>off. (useful for just my text document drawer). True network shares
>which allow you to have different users logged in & give them access to
>specific drawers on your HD. And on and on...
I'm not trying to be contrary for its own sake, but let me make a few
points here about something I have pulled my hair out over quite a few
times :) Correct me if I'm wrong, but the sharing in Win2K is the same for
NTFS or FAT drives?
There are certainly some tradeoffs with NTFS. Whether NTFS is "better" is
certainly a matter of debate, and depends largely on your situation. I
used to be a network administrator, and have had to deal with NTFS volume
corruption on many an occasion.
The main advantage (today) of NTFS is volume security. If you need this,
then you have little recourse. A secondary advantage (before the advent of
FAT32) was that it was able to handle large disks. I have occasionally
heard claims that NTFS is faster, and theoretically it could be under
certain conditions, but then again FAT32 should be faster under other
conditions.
The main problem with NTFS is that recovery options are shockingly limited
should anything go seriously wrong with a NTFS volume. (Anyone out there
have nightmares of chkdsk?) The truth is, if an NTFS volume gets very
corrupted, you really have no way of repairing it. Formatting is often the
only stable fix. NTFS is also prone to unexplainable problems that chkdsk
cannot seem to detect/correct. Admittedly, outside of a high usage
(server) type situation these problems are relatively uncommon.
NTFS also has a number of characteristic differences- Unlike FAT, which
uses a "fixed grid" allocation system of clusters, NTFS utilizes a sort of
"sliding grid" (for lack of a better term) allocation system. If the gap
between 2 files on a volume becomes smaller than a certain amount, (varies
by disk size) the space between them cannot be utilized by NTFS. This is
NTFS' version of wasted "Slack Space" that we are familiar with in FAT
systems, where a cluster is the smallest allocatable unit and all files are
rounded up to the next cluster. The difference is this: In a FAT system a
given set of files will always have exactly the same amount of wasted slack
space. Under NTFS slack space can vary in the upward direction based on
files' relative positions to each other. This extra slack space can
sometimes become very significant. This is usually not much of a problem
unless volumes are allowed to heavily fragment, or there is much file
creation/deletion activity over time. The problem is magnified with small
files.
I guess the point is this: NTFS is different. Not necessarily
better. Know the tradeoffs before you convert; you can't undo it.
Btw, the max file size for a FAT drive is 2Gb, not 1Gb.
-Frank
Frank Gilley
Dell-Star Technologies
(918) 838-1973 Phone
(918) 838-8814 Fax
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.dellstar.com
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