wwwd Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 I've bought myself a 1TB Portable Hard Drive, and was wondering which format should use? FAT or NTFS? At the moment it's using FAT32 but it seems to be painfully slow when transferring files... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaweV6 Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 NTFS FAT32 is only good enough for small memory cards these days. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shawdreamer Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 NTFS FAT32 is only good enough for small memory cards these days.+1 my 1Tb external and 500Mb were both originally fat32 also and as I have no real knowledge of these format types I never thought any of the wiser. my techead mate reformatted my 1Tb to NTFS and its response time flew up hugely. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JC Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 NTFS is way better, but what are you using it for? As the one usb drive i had to reformat to fat32 as the device would not read ntfs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hezz Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 ntfs does fat32 support 1tb? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaweV6 Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 ntfs does fat32 support 1tb? The maximum possible number of clusters on a volume using the FAT32 file system is 268,435,445. With a maximum of 32 KB per cluster with space for the file allocation table (FAT), this equates to a maximum disk size of approximately 8 terabytes (TB) Doesn't mean that it is a good idea Anyway, anything from Win2k upwards won't be happy with volumes over 32 GB. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smithyandco Posted April 18, 2011 Share Posted April 18, 2011 Also bare in mind FAT32 has file size limits of around 4GB per file. - FAT32 is only known to perform better than NTFS on volumes of 32GB and lower. NTFS also has limits... but it's very unlikely that any file you have will ever reach that limit on your 1TB drive as the theoretical limit is 16TB per file. - NTFS performs poorly on volumes under 32GB in general. exFAT is also an option... It's file size limit is 16EB (16 Million TerraBytes/TB) again in theory. exFAT is supported by Windows Vista, 7 (XP Requires an update for support) and Xbox360s - It is known to perform well on all size volumes. But it lacks in areas such as security and volume compression. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wwwd Posted April 20, 2011 Author Share Posted April 20, 2011 In the end I partitioned it, 500GB as NTFS and 500GB as FAT32! Well, 500GB as NTFS and the remaining 431GB as FAT32. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeeWee Posted April 20, 2011 Share Posted April 20, 2011 In the end I partitioned it, 500GB as NTFS and 500GB as FAT32! Well, 500GB as NTFS and the remaining 431GB as FAT32. Reason for this partitioning was? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wwwd Posted April 26, 2011 Author Share Posted April 26, 2011 In the end I partitioned it, 500GB as NTFS and 500GB as FAT32! Well, 500GB as NTFS and the remaining 431GB as FAT32. Reason for this partitioning was?I wanted to backup files, so that's what the NTFS partition is for. But I also wanted to store videos on it so they would play on my PS3. After a bit of research it seems that the PS3 only reads FAT32 (as NTFS is only a Microsoft thing) so that's why I have a FAT32 partition as well. Plus apparently Mac's don't read NTFS either - so essentially I'm making sure I can use the drive on any device really. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stuey650 Posted April 26, 2011 Share Posted April 26, 2011 Mac's do read ntfs or they can as a network share anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wwwd Posted April 26, 2011 Author Share Posted April 26, 2011 Mac's do read ntfs or they can as a network share anyway.Strange as I've read NTFS is a Microsoft format so it won't work on Apple hardware. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
smithyandco Posted April 26, 2011 Share Posted April 26, 2011 Strange as I've read NTFS is a Microsoft format so it won't work on Apple hardware.Macs (OSX) can read NTFS but cannot write to NTFS out of the box.(Pretty much like most flavours of Linux) MacFUSE is meant to contain the Mac driver for NTFS if your interested in faffing around. Regardless of the above, the PS3 does not support NTFS (Well... not without "hacking") or exFAT, only FAT and FAT32 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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