NTFS vs FAT32 for rendering speed

[mrhafez]

hello !
NTFS file system how much faster is than FAT32 for rendering the edited files for DVD ?
Thanks.

[Clevo]

don't know. I don't even think the file system is a speed factor. i just go with what ever my operating system preferres.

What are your system specs? (click on the "system" tage to complete)

[lespurgeon]

I'd go NTFS for other reasons - no 2 GB file size limit, better error handling. Not sure it would be faster - I think that is more physical drive.

The ONLY reason I would consider Fat32 is if you need to read/write to drive from a MAC

[Clevo]

I'd go NTFS for other reasons - no 2 GB file size limit, better error handling. Not sure it would be faster - I think that is more physical drive.

The ONLY reason I would consider Fat32 is if you need to read/write to drive from a MAC

If he's running windows 98 he's stuck with FAT32 though right?

I believe XP and Vista force you to go for NTFS...though I think you can choose.

[babdi]

NTFS was designed to handle larger HDD drvies as FAT32 imposed limition on HDD size. It does not help in rendering anyway. Rendering speed is dependent on
1) Video file size being rendered
2) Processor speed
3) RAM, DDR1 is the slowest while DDR3 is the fastest in terms of bus speed.
However SATA HDDs have better seek times than IDE drives and hence helps indirectly in rendering speed with "Smart proxy" option enabled.

[Ron P.]

If he's running Win98, he is limited to FAT32. The sister OS at the time to Win98, was Windows NT4, which of course was NTSF. I believe shortly thereafter Win2k was available, it also ran on the NTSF format.

[2Dogs]

Assuming that you have Win2000 or later, you can use either FAT32 or NTFS. You do indeed have a choice. You can change your active partition from FAT32 to NTFS, but it's a one way conversion. You can change data partitions to NTFS and back to FAT32 if you wish.

One additional advantage of NTFS is that it uses a smaller cluster size, so there is less wasted space on a drive, especially noticeable if you have lots of small files - less so if you have a few large files.

With FAT 32, you are not able to use the Windows Indexing service. With NTFS, this service is enabled by default, but is a huge resource hog, and will noticeably slow down your pc. It's the first thing I disable on all my pc's.

In view of the fact that most people leave the indexing service in its default configuration, you could say that FAT32 was faster than NTFS.

[etech6355]

The limitations for FAT32 depend on the Operating System and program accessing it.
FAT32 can be used on very large drives. Linux has no problems with this, formatting them or read/writing to them.

It's a windows limitation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT32#FAT32

Someone gave me an external 500gig usb drive. It came formatted as NTFS.
Under Linux I simply re-formatted the drive FAT32.
Windows XP & Vista reads & writes from this drive without any problems.

The drawback to FAT32 is file size limitations compared to NTFS.

[2Dogs]

The drawback to FAT32 is file size limitations compared to NTFS.

Whereas I see the main drawback being the large cluster size when it's used on larger drives. FAT32 can only address so many clusters, so the clusters will be larger than they would be if you used NTFS. For large video files, this will be insignificant - but I would not use FAT32 for a drive containing lots of small files. You end up with loads of "file slack", which is often a good place for malware to hide out. I believe the file slack needs to be regularly cleaned out with an erasing utility, which takes time - and longer on an FAT32 drive. I have no experience of using Linux, but since Video Studio is not ported to Linux, I doubt that it would be of much concern to most users here.

The principal benefit of NTFS, as lespurgeon suggested, apart from the improved storage efficiency resulting from the smaller clusters, is in it's error-handling and self-healing capabilities.

[imjay]

Unless forced by OS I can't imagine why anyone would opt for the older and limited FAT32 HDD file management system when they can be using NTFS. IMO

[2Dogs]

Unless forced by OS I can't imagine why anyone would opt for the older and limited FAT32 HDD file management system when they can be using NTFS. IMO

One reason would be for a FAT32 partition on which to store Norton Ghost backup images - very useful indeed.

Another would be to do a clean Windows install onto a FAT32 partition, then converting to NTFS, in order to achieve the cleanest possible install.

But for general usage...no, NTFS is generally better.

[lespurgeon]

I'd go NTFS for other reasons - no 2 GB file size limit, better error handling. Not sure it would be faster - I think that is more physical drive.

The ONLY reason I would consider Fat32 is if you need to read/write to drive from a MAC

If he's running windows 98 he's stuck with FAT32 though right?

I believe XP and Vista force you to go for NTFS...though I think you can choose.

That is true. I hadn't thought of Win 98. Not sure Videostudio would even run on it, but I suppose version 5 or something would.

I do keep one (of 5) external hard drives with Fat32 so that my wife can back up her Mac to it.

[mrhafez]

Thank you all for quick response !
But when defragment is effective in rendering speed may be file system is effective. becuse of larg amount of read write on HDD . I am using win XP pro and my c: in NTFS and the rest of pars are FAT32.

[lespurgeon]

It is also important to render to a separate drive, not just a separate partition.

[2Dogs]

It is also important to render to a separate drive, not just a separate partition.

Good point. This will significantly speed up Smart Rendering, which in effect is just writing a file, and therefore limited by the read/write speed of the hard drive. Smart rendering to a separate drive therefore eliminates the I/O bottleneck that would otherwise occur when reading from and writing to the same drive.

When you're not Smart Rendering, the difference is far less significant, since the limiting factor is mainly the cpu encoding the video, and a single hard drive can keep up with it.