For Win 2000 and Win XP Pro
and Home Edition (FAT/FAT32)
NTFS or FAT/FAT32 Partition
NTFS partitioning mainly made for network administrating use.
It doesn't save on hard disk unless you want to use drive
compression, actually FAT32 uses less hard disk space.
Nor significantly is a better file format than FAT32.
Not recommended for personal and small business use.
No DOS access, you can't boot to it with a boot disk, which
means you can't retrieve your data if drive get corrupted.*
You have to rely on Microsoft unreliable restore, or dual boot
to another instance of Win 2000 or XP in order to do an
efficient backup and restore.NTFS
Advanced file level and folder level security.
Allows you to control advanced access to files and folders.
Disk compression
Compresses drive to store more data on the partition.
Disk quotas
Allows you to control disk space use on a per user basis.
File encryption
Allows you to encrypt file data on the physical hard disk.Also supports remote storage, Dynamic volumes, and the
mounting of volumes to folders.**
Windows 2000/XP and Windows NT are the only operating
systems that can access data on a local hard disk that is
formatted with NTFS.
Note: Some of the above features are not available in
Win XP Home Edition. Or only available on in the Server
version.
FAT/FAT32
FAT32 is an enhanced version of the FAT file system that can
be used on drives from 512 MB to 2 TB (Terabytes) in size.
Support dual booting, no file level security (permissions), but
you can restrict/allow sharing to drives, folders and printers
using passwords, and allow Network Share on a file or folder.
Microsoft recommends that you use NTFS rather than FAT32 for
partitions larger than 32 GB, I would rather partition my hard drive
to partitions smaller then 32 GB rather than using crippled NTFS.+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
* MS-DOS puts much less load on a hard drive than Windows.
If a drive went bad, chances are very high that you can retrieve
your important data in DOS and be able to copy it over to
another drive, while it is impossible to do in Windows.
** Dynamic volumes, a dangerous way storing your data.
It allows using multiple partitions as one drive. But if one drive
or any part of the data get corrupted, then you will loose all the
data on all partitions, and can't be retrieved.
You can add new drives to a Dynamic volume but can't
replace one with another.
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