NTFS Vs FAT for small volumes

[MartinX]

I figure this is a good forum to ask in.

I got me thinking, say I had a smallish partition, and I installed a game on it, would NTFS or FAT32 yield the better performance,

My (limited) understanding of how the two systems work leads me to believe that, quite possibly, FAT would be the superior FS under those conditions, because it's simpler and has lower system overhead and there aren't that many small files involved.

Is this thinking totally off-base?

If not, how big would the volume (interms of the amount of data on it) have to get before ntfs became the optimal solution again?

Bearing in mind once again that I'm talking in terms of Games, so very big, and very small files would tend to be the exception.

 

[oplin]

If the partition is on the same drive that the windows partition is on, i don't think either one of those is going to matter much at all. And if you're creating a games partition dedicating a whole drive to it and keeping it defraged would probably be your best preformance. Creating multiple small partitions on a drive seems like a bad idea to, using folders to organize stuff on one partition would be better.

If you could explain your whole drive setup and system and what you are trying to do that might help better. For your question as is, I would assume FAT would be faster with a smaller cluster size if most of the files are smaller in size.

 

[Malvenkemo*]

Martin is right, it doesn't seem very advantageous to split your current drive up into a group of seperate partitions.

In my experience, however, while FAT32 has less system overhead, I've always found that NTFS is more stable in comparison to the FAT filesystems. So I suppose in the end you're going to have to decide between speed or stability.

 

[vischo]

What year is it?

 

[MrGuvernment]

maming paritions on the sme physical drive = ZERO performance gains.

NTFS is more reliable and secure and handles more gigs and any performance gain fat32 may have, you wont notice anyways.

 

[MartinX]

What year is it?

It's 2006, nearly 2007.

And let me just say that's it's always great to see someone overcome their mental challenges, and the difficulties of using a rubberized safety keyboard, to try to contribute to normal society.

You keep it up champ, maybe one day people will stop calling you "special" and recognise that you can be of value too.

 

[MartinX]

maming paritions on the sme physical drive = ZERO performance gains.

NTFS is more reliable and secure and handles more gigs and any performance gain fat32 may have, you wont notice anyways.

I'm talking about very specific conditions, the physical drive with the OS and most of my stuff on it is NTFS, as is the external drive I keep most of larger volume *cough* Media *cough* stuff on, but after tidying up those two drives recently I found that my second internal drive was basically empty, and it got me thinking experimental-wise.

Security is not relevant to this drive, and there aren't a great number of files involved or volume of data involved, and stability isn't particularly important.

The objective behind this train of thought is also quite specific, one of the bottlenecks in my systems performance (as it is for most modern systems) is the delay in actually pulling game data off the HDD, it doesn't affect fps, but it does create slight and noticeable stuttering/hitching while wandering around larger game environments, I'm thinking Cyrodil/Azeroth here, and I was just curious as to whether installing those games on a separate, FAT32 drive could smooth that out even slightly.

I'm gonna try it anyway, just to see, it doesn't require any substantial effort on my part so I may as well.

 

[E4g1e]

I'm talking about very specific conditions, the physical drive with the OS and most of my stuff on it is NTFS, as is the external drive I keep most of larger volume *cough* Media *cough* stuff on, but after tidying up those two drives recently I found that my second internal drive was basically empty, and it got me thinking experimental-wise.

Security is not relevant to this drive, and there aren't a great number of files involved or volume of data involved, and stability isn't particularly important.

The objective behind this train of thought is also quite specific, one of the bottlenecks in my systems performance (as it is for most modern systems) is the delay in actually pulling game data off the HDD, it doesn't affect fps, but it does create slight and noticeable stuttering/hitching while wandering around larger game environments, I'm thinking Cyrodil/Azeroth here, and I was just curious as to whether installing those games on a separate, FAT32 drive could smooth that out even slightly.

I'm gonna try it anyway, just to see, it doesn't require any substantial effort on my part so I may as well.

Unfortunately, an OS with NTFS support, such as Windows XP or 2000, cannot format FAT32 volumes larger than 33.8GB (32GiB) in size on its own. If you have a 300GB drive formatted using FAT32, you will have a whopping 9 to 10 different partitions on that drive anyway. If you want that entire drive as one single volume, you will have to use NTFS.

 

[oplin]

You're not going to gain anything from putting it on the same drive as windows like MrGuvernment said, in fact it will probably decrease preforamnce if anything.

If you're going to use 1 drive and the os is on it, reduce anything that uses disk activity on it other than the game. IE load up the os kernal in memory, turn off your page file (not recommend, but for gaming preformance might be justified if running 4 gigs of ram).

Or just go out and buy 4 cheap a$$ drives like 60gigs apiece or smaller, put them all in Raid 0 setup and your disk preformance should be 3x what it is now, with onboard raid chip. Should cost less than 150$ if you shop right.