Page 1 of EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE DO I NEED TO CHANGE FORMATS ON MY P.C.........

just bought an external hard drive 320gb, i have windows xp and basically its a plug and play drive that pretty much installed itself.
however it has been recomended that i change the format it is in FAT 32 TO NTFS which is supposed to be better for xp.
can anyone tell me if this advice is right and what the diffrence is, there are instructions in the manual but it does not realy say which format is best for xp.

NTFS is more robust than FAT32 and supports more security and management features, however for the average home user I would suggest that is main benefit is the ability to handle larger file sizes. You can`t write a full DVD iso file to FAT32.

The downside of NTFS comes if you wish to attach the drive to anything other than and NT/XP pc as their is very little support for the Format outside of Microsoft. Linux has had the ability to read NTFS for some time but the write ability is fairly recent and still definitely beta.

If, for example you have a DVD player equipped with DIVX decoding and a USB port, it is not going to see any NTFS partitions.

If you are just going to use the drive with XP then go NTFS, otherwise you need to consider the options.

thanks its nice to have that simply explained, i guess i will go with the ntfs as its been bought for my windows xp.

So,

Windows - NTFS
DVD DivX Player - FAT 32

I`m thinking about buying an external HD for my DVD DivX Player. Would I put the files on in HTFS mode and then switch it over FAT 32? (If there even is a switch, how does this work?

PS. Sorry for the thread hi-jack Peter.

Quote:
Would I put the files on in HTFS mode and then switch it over FAT 32? (If there even is a switch, how does this work?

No you don`t switch between them, you either format the disc as NTFS or FAT 32. The formatting process writes to the disk effectively laying out a map defining how your files will be stored on the disk. Once the disk has been formatted you may write your files to it, but once you have your files on the disk it is not easy to change the format without erasing the files. So it is important to choose the format carefully.

Your DVD/DivX player is not going to read NTFS so you must use FAT 32, which your pc should be happy with. You will need to remember that you cannot write a file larger than 4GB using FAT32. If you need to be able to write larger files to this disk you could split the disk into two partitions, format the first as FAT 32 and the second as NTFS.

Another consideration is that XP will not format a FAT 32 partition larger than 32GB so if your drive, or partition, is larger you need to use a 3rd party tool such the excellent SwissKnife, which can format FAT 32 as large as 2048GB!
http://www.compuapps.com/download/Swissknife/swissknife.htm

HTH

fat32 won`t format a partition larger than 32GB ?!!!!! Er think not. That`s only when installing XP due to the limitations of the setup tool and I assume that as its an external drive he won`t be doing that.
XP has the facility to convert a FAT32 drive to NTFS without destroying the contents but its preferable to do a complete format as its recommended to format NTFS with 4kb bloks apparently and conversion is liable to leave you with 256 byte blocks instead.

Quote:
fat32 won`t format a partition larger than 32GB ?!!!!! Er think not. That`s only when installing XP due to the limitations of the setup tool and I assume that as its an external drive he won`t be doing that.
The standard tools within windows will not allow you to format a partition greater than 32GB using FAT 32. You will only be offered the choice of NTFS (hobson`s choice). AFAIK you either use third-party tools or you can use the format.exe program form Win 98.

Convert.exe will allow conversion from FAT to NTFS but it is one way only.

This item was edited on Wednesday, 6th December 2006, 16:52