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Thread: NTFS or FAT32?
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Old 10th July 2006 | 21:02
  #7 (permalink)  
IO540
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Joined: Jun 2003
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From: EuroGA.org
All very good tech points for NTFS, but not really relevant to a single user scenario with unlimited physical access by that user, and (one assumes) zero physical access for everybody else.

1. Caching is of no help with lots of small files being read for the first time in ages (hence my CD writing example)

2. NTFS security is exactly zero unless you have rock solid physical (access) security. If somebody can stick a DOS6.2 boot disk (or a suitable boot CD) in, with NTFSDOS on it, you can forget all security... So, no relevance to personal users. Equally, if an attacker can execute code of his choice (the case with most of M$ "buffer overflow" back doors) security is back to zero.

3. Efficiency doesn't come into it, with today's massive hard drives.

4. I wouldn't agree that NTFS is better for reliability, in the data recovery sense. I think NTFS does support full journalling but doesn't actually implement it (it would be impractical). So the data is stored only once and if you lose that bit you have lost it - just like FAT16, FAT32, etc. The worse thing, with a crashed drive, is that with FAT you can retrieve anything undamaged on the HD easily whereas NTFS is a right jumble.
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