I mentioned this thread to a friend, and he e-mailed me back with this overview. It seems to contain some extra angles on the issue.
I edit to say that when he says
'FAT was always very unreliable;' it is from his view point. I recal him saying 25 years ago, 'a system should not crash....EVER.' not judged by mortal standard then. ;-)
So, the issues of NTFS vs. FAT continue. FAT (File Allocation Table)
was "invented" for the very first floppy drives. In those days it used
only 12 bit cluster addresses and thus could address only 4096 clusters
- more than enough for the tiny floppy disks of the time. When the
first
PC hard drives appeared they extended FAT to 16 bit addressing, and
this
was known as FAT16. This allowed 65536 clusters to be handled. The
maximum sized disk was then 65536 times the cluster size: a 4K cluster
gave a 1/4 Gig max. disk, and a 32K cluster gave the magic 2 Gig. max.
Unfortunately, each cluster can contain only one file, or portion of a
file. You cannot put two files in the same cluster, so a file
containing
only one byte occupies a complete cluster - if its a 32K cluster then
32k-1 bytes were wasted.
With the advent of FAT32, the 2Gig barrier was finally broken and
sensible sized clusters could be used, but that's not the end of the
story...
FAT was always very unreliable; one attempt to combat this was to
maintain a duplicate FAT (the actual FAT is, in essence, the heart of
the system - when it gets corrupted you can lose bits of files). When
the FATs got out of sync it was apparent that something had gone wrong
and you could run CHKDSK to fix it. This is the reason that you were
forced to run it when the system wasn't properly closed down. Despite
the duplicate FAT the whole system was never very reliable and files
were often found to be corrupted.
Enter totally different file systems. The best one of all was the one
that IBM developed for OS/2 - the one called HPFS (High Performance
File
System) - but this lost favour with the demise of OS/2. When MS's
version of OS/2 came out it had a brand new file system - NTFS (New
Technology File System). This was based on the HPFS system but wasn't
quite as good. There have been 5 versions of NTFS - 1 to 3 were used
for NT 1 to NT 3. version 4 was for Windows 2000, and version 5 for XP.
All the NTFSs broke the 2Gig barrier, but the earlier versions were not
particularly good performers. The later versions improved this and were
not very different from FAT32, but they were much more reliable.
In short, NTFS is FAR better than FAT. Its as fast and much more
reliable. There really is no contest. FAT was never designed for large,
permanently mounted hard disks. NTFS was. Period. The big problem is
that W98 and earlier cannot read it at all - NTFS partitions are simply
invisible to systems earlier than W98.