Re: OT: More OS questions

On Wed, 23 May 2007 10:17:20 +0100, deKay <andyk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Soni tempori elseu romani yeof helsforo nisson ol sefini ill des Wed, 23 May
2007 10:12:16 +0100, sefini jorgo geanyet des mani yeof do
uk.games.video.misc, yawatina tan reek esk Zomoniac
<the_proper_one@xxxxxxxxxxx> fornis do marikano es bono tan el:

The things I don't know. Isn't FAT32 slower/less reliable?

Neither. In fact, if anything, I'd say it's the opposite. Whenever I've had
partitions go tits up, I've always had more success recovering data from a FAT
one than an NTFS.

I'd like to advance a different opinion. FAT32 is ridiculously fragile
- the sole safety feature is having two copies of the index, but since
if there's a difference there's no way to tell which copy is right,
this actually makes them less reliable than only having one. This
simplicity does make it a teeeeeeny bit faster on small partitions -
up to about 4gig. Beyond that the file allocation units get so large
that you can end up wasting a third of your disk in unusable space.

NTFS is one of the few decently designed things to come out of
Redmond, a metadata-redundant and -journalling filesystem that can
always roll back any changes to the indexes after a messy crash. I've
not had a software or power-outage caused NTFS failure since NT4sp3
days, and I've spent most of the years in between managing smallish
(sub 100 machines) Windows networks. It's roughly equivalent to
EXT3FS.

Recovery - FAT used to be easier back when we only had one computer
and just a floppy disk to boot from, and backups were too expensive.
These days there's no excuse for not performing backups, and NTFS is
as easily mountable from another Windows, Windows boot CD, or a Linux
live disk that it's not worth worrying about.

I would never use any FAT variants if I had any choice in the matter.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
Never sleep with anyone crazier than you are.
.

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