Which formats faster - FAT or NTFS ?

thumb rule ... fat for pen drives drives ( with flash memory ) .. ntfs on everthing else including external and portable drives. Ntfs maintains journal, less fragmentation overhead , lower chances of data loss in case of crash, no 4 gb file size limit and permissions ( if you use it ). Fat on another hand is very simple filesystem and has much less writes comapratively so it's better for flash based memory as they have fixed amount of write cycles in their life time .
 
hmm...I dont know which is faster to format ?

Dont think there is any diff between the two in this apspect

all the reasons mentioned above come into play after format.
 
You get a quick format for both the file systems on windows platform, so i dont think you should really worry about the format times. Quick format does a "delete all files" and skips the check for bad sectors in hard disk where as the full format does write a 0 in all sectors and checks for bad sectors in hard disk.
So formatting of the drive will actually depend on the way it is formatted than the file system it is formatted. Though i am inclined to think writing the disk with the NTFS and more advanced file systems like ext3 and ext4 may take microseconds more time, but it is not substantial
 
If you have 8gb Flash Drive, then of course NTFS. I forgot the file size limit for FAT. And my files usually hit that limit easily.

FAT is outdated and out. So go with NTFS, unless you want to plug your usb to things like DVD player or TV.
 
a_k_s_h_a_y said:
If you have 8gb Flash Drive, then of course NTFS. I forgot the file size limit for FAT. And my files usually hit that limit easily.

FAT is outdated and out. So go with NTFS, unless you want to plug your usb to things like DVD player or TV.
Click to expand...

I will say it again, using ntfs on flash based memory will reduce it's life ( compared to fat ). Fat has 4 gb file size limit.
 
rapt0r said:
I will say it again, using ntfs on flash based memory will reduce it's life ( compared to fat ). Fat has 4 gb file size limit.
Click to expand...

Don't worry about it, it can be written a millions times. Until then physical damage would have turned it in.
 
Back
Top