Re: Change file system on new HD?

Dave Royal <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Godzilla wrote:

I believe that new hard disks come formatted as FAT32. Would there be an
advantage in re-formatting it to ext. 3?

I bought a Western Digital 250 SATA disk recently and it was unformatted
- as were all the others I've bought over the years.

However I also just bought a new Lenovo PC with windows XP
pre-installed. I was wondering whether to shrink the NTFS partition
before or after configuring XP and decided to do it afterwards. I was
surprised to find that the disk was FAT32, and the first thing XP did
was reformat it to NTFS. Odd.

Not really. Disk areas are assigned by "cluster". The driver
a file cluster by cluster. On average the last cluster is only
half filled.

In FAT32 for various reasons, mostly addressibility, as the disk
size grows, the cluster size grows. So on large disks (bigger
than a few dozen gigabytes) the cluster size is enormous. Thus
there is a HUGE amount of wasted space.

Linux solved that problem one way. Microsoft did it another way.
But Microsoft *will* format the drive NTFS for efficiency if you
don't stop it. (There is a way, but I've forgotten how that goes.)

--
--- Paul J. Gans
.

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