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  3. NTFS or FAT32 ?

  • NTFS or FAT32 ?

    G
    G
    What do you use ?

    What’s the best choice ?


    Regards

    The French dyslexic who speaks badly English.
  • cmC
    VSL Team
    cmC
    strictly NTFS (secure, reliable, journaling, ect) - use a cluster-size of 4096 (if you want to store samples on the disk) lesser will decrease performance, more doesn't allow you to use the buildt-in defragmentation.
    if this is a point: you cannot use NTFS-partitions from W95/98/ME without additional drivers from sysinternals.com and not with a mac
    christian
    and remember: only a CRAY can run an endless loop in just three seconds.
  • C
    C
    If your HD is being used only for samples, defrag will not be needed except when you add new samples and delete others. I would think a much larger NTFS buffer size would be advisable since samples files are large and perfromance benifits when you have large files and a larger cluster size.

    Slightly off topic but useful for people who have FAT32 formatted drives and want NTFS. XP comes with an executable called convert.exe. It will convert a FAT32 formatted disk to NTFS. It will not convert in the other direction though. If you use the convert.exe to convert from FAT to NTFS, Windows always uses a 512-byte cluster size.

    Craig Duke
  • G
    G
    Hi Christian and Craig.

    Thanks for your advice.

    I’m a XP user, so, I’ll don’t have to convert a FAT32 formatted disk to NTFS, if I make my choice now.

    That why I take advices.

    I know that we can’t convert a NTFS formated disk to FAT32 whith XP, but I can do it whith a soft : Hard Disk Manager (http://www.paragon-gmbh.com/f_fm.htm)

    I don’t know if we can do it with samples and audio files without any problem...



    Now for the cluster-size : Christian, do you use a cluster-size of 4096 whit VSL, or whith audio files ? Both of them ?

    On PC ?

    And Craig, what size do you use ?



    The French dyslexic who speaks badly English.
  • cmC
    VSL Team
    cmC
    i use 4kB clustersize on each drive i expect to store mainly files bigger than 40 kB , default size (512 B) on the systemdrive and 1kB on drives for multiple purposes. my pagefile usually is not located on the system-drive.
    as audio-files generally are bigger than 40kB this applies not only to drives holding the VSL as gig-files but also to drives holding audio-data
    christian
    and remember: only a CRAY can run an endless loop in just three seconds.
  • C
    C
    last edited
    last edited

    @Crystal said:

    And Craig, what size do you use ?
    [/i]

    I am using ME at home and XP and 2000 at work (I'm a Software Engineer). I have no control over my work drives as they are under the strict control of corporate System Administrators (the SAs do allow be to adjust my chair - on occasion). My giga FAT32 drives at home use 32K clusters. That is why I was posing the question of larger than 4K clusters for NTFS. This is because; as I under stand HDs, the access mechanism is cluster-based i.e. each read cycle reads or writes one cluster. Given this, the time to read 32K of data for a 4K cluster formatted disk would include 8 times the overhead (overhead related to this portion of a disk access). In other words it would require 8 read cycles (eight overheadTimes) instead of one for a 32K cluster formatted drive (one overheadTime) . I need to do some more NTFS research before I draw any hard conclusions though. Comments anyone?