FAT32...and external HDDs?

[andyoxon]

I'm after a external HDD, could someone explain what FAT32 is , and why it's best avoided for backup of NB files?  What is the alternative?

I prolly go for a 500GB of some make, although the little 2.5" portable ones are quite attractive for carrying a copy of files around with you.

[Valiant]

FAT32 is a type of file system, it has various limits in terms of how big the partitions can be and/or file size limits, it used to be about 2GB but it may have changed. NTFS is a much better file system to use. To be honest, you won't notice any difference between them in normal use.

[jellied]

Valiant speaks the truth. FAT32 had a file limit and volume size too.

NTFS does away that - i got a new 500gb Western Digital after the kids had filled up the main PC with photos and sodding iTunes. I re-formatted the drive at work - took about 2 hours but very painless.

Go home, plug in new drive, wait 4 seconds and pleasing blue light comes on and away we went on a massive cut & paste spree.

[tonycollinet]

File Allocation Table - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Limits see to be about 4GB max file size (can be a problem for some video files)

8TB for maximum volume size (Not yet an issue - but close)

About max 260million clusters. That means on a 500GB Drive, the cluster size will be about 2k which means that any file no matter how small will use 2K space - this is only likely to be an issue if you store millions of very small files.


NTFS is a better format, but is not readable by some earlier versions of windows (I think winME and earlier can't read it - but might be wrong on this)

[Rob S]

Another thing  in the instructions of my Toshiba External HDD there was a warning that when using NTFS the drive couldn't be secured by a password...not sure if that's just a Toshiba issue though.