i sure do appreciate ntfs . . .

[sde]

when i have to defrag a fat32 partition

is there any good reasons to format in fat32 anymore?

the i.t. dept who setup this laptop with xp pro set my primary partition to fat32, and the other to ntfs. at home i use ntfs on win2k and haven't had any issues because of it.

[joe_bruin]

fat can be read and written by virtually every desktop os out there. it is probably the lightest filesystem you can have in terms of memory useage, disk usage, and processor requirements. that's why it is used on floppies, compact flash devices, and others. it is also good for exchanging data in multiboot systems.

however, it is also an archaeic filesystem, slow, does not handle permissions, and is error prone. it is highly recommended that you NOT use fat as your primary drive, or anywhere you have valuable date. often, nt...xp gets installed on fat32 because the installer is using some automated tool that can't read/write ntfs, upgrades from win9x, or general retardation. microsoft has disabled winxp from formatting fat32 partitions larger than 32 gigs, to prevent people from using it on newer disks.