Per M$, if you are upgrading from a FAT32 OS, it's best performance-wise
to just leave it that way when installing XP:
"If you do choose an upgrade from Windows 2000 or Windows 9x, you may be
working with a FAT32 file system. Performance will generally be better
if the file system is left as it is, rather than converted to NTFS. A
partition converted from FAT32 to NTFS may have to use 512-byte
clusters, rather than 4096-byte or 8192-byte clusters, which can result
in a higher number of fragmented files."
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/platform/performance/benchmark.asp
Otherwise, to optimize performance, installing NTFS on a clean partition
would have the edge. Someone correct me if I'm offbase, but I believe
the NTFS support in the Linux kernel is still tagged as "experimental",
and should be considered "read-only" in a dual-boot system. I've
dual-booted for years, and I like the convenience of having read/write
capability across all my partitions, so when I recently installed XP on
my "MS" partition, I left it FAT32 to avoid any data corruption issues.
That way, I can continue to move Word docs over to my much larger Linux
partitions and convert them to Open Office format...;-) Another concern
is not knowing just what additional tweaks M$ may have made to the newer
NTFS format that would possibly cause problems interchanging data
between the NTFS and ext3 partitions. Beyond that, I suppose it boils
down to how and why *you* are using XP in the first place....e.g., if
you really need ACL capability, then you'll go NTFS.....
Nathan England wrote:
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>My thoughts as well. But what about performance? Does NTFS
>under XP provide better performance?
>
>Am Dienstag 23 Juli 2002 06:51 nachmittags/abends schrieb
>Michelle Lowman:
>
>>I'm sure there is someone here more knowledgeable about
>>this than I am, but if I remember correctly from my MCSE
>>courses, you really don't need NTFS for a typical user. The
>>new NTFS has a lot of security goodies (very fine-grained
>>permissions, etc.), but the average user will probably
>>never use them. And I think that if the user ever decides
>>to dual boot with Linux, he'll have a much easier time
>>trying to write to a FAT32 partition than an NTFS
>>partition.
>>
>>On Tue, 2002-07-23 at 17:43, Nathan England wrote:
>>
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>>>
>>>I was building a new machine for a custmer today and they
>>>wanted XP installed. I formatted the drive ahead of time
>>>with fat32, then XP only offered to format NTFS or leave
>>>the partition alone. So I want anyone's opinion on this.
>>>I heard that NTFS is newer than that used in NT and has
>>>performance modifications. Does anyone know the benefits
>>>of using NTFS with XP home on a typical users machine?
>>>Or is fat32 still better? Do the security advances
>>>outweigh being able to boot off a floppy and recover
>>>data?
>>>
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