XP, NTFS, FAT, Drive Letter Juggling, And More!
Fred: This lady finally up graded to Windows XP from Win 98 2nd E.
I have been going through your articles at Information Week on the tweaks of XP and I came across where you say you have the OS XP on NTFS and the rest of your partitions as Fat 32 because it does not takes as much space and is faster.I have two hard drives, one is 80G ( divided into two partitions ) and the other hard drive is 250G divided into 3 partitions. XP on C (12 G ) and if I understand what you are saying then I should make the other partitions as fat 32 and to put my swap file which I have set at 3070 min & max on the fat 32 partition ?
Another question which I cannot find the answer..... How in the world do I get the partitions to be D, E, F, etc... with DVD and CD below the hard drives instead of the middle? Thank You, Bekki Bouvet
On any drive or partition larger than 8GB, NTFS is actually quite a bit more space-efficient that Fat32. On your 80Gb drive, for example, NTFS will chop the drive into usable chunks--- "clusters"--- of 4K each. On the same drive, FAT32 would break the drive into clusters of 32K each. Let's say you save a 1K file on each system. The NTFS system will put the 1K file in a 4K cluster, wasting 3K. (The wasted space is called "slack.") The FAT32 system will put the 1K file in a 32K cluster, wasting 31K. So, NTFS is much more space-efficient--- it generates much less slack--- on large drives.
As for speed, the differences are most notable in database-like activities, where the file system has to serve up information dug from within a larger file or files. This includes swapfile/pagefile operations, so it is possible to get a marginal speed improvement by placing the swapfile/pagefile in a FAT32 partition.
In other operations, the speed difference is smaller and may shrink to meaninglessness, especially on current-generation hardware. (Example: gaming. See http://tinyurl.com/ot38f ) And even in the database-type operations, you're not talking about saving enough time to knock off early for the day. <g> Rather, it's a marginal improvement that high-order geeks (I plead guilty!) might seek in a quest to make everything work as well as it can when the system's being pushed to the max. But in ordinary use, you might not even notice any difference at all.
So, if you push your system hard and want or need to wring out every last iota of performance, then putting the swapfile/pagefile on FAT32 might be worth doing. But otherwise, for simplicity, and for the other benefits it offers, NTFS is probably the better choice, especially on larger drives or partitions.
Lots more: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/100108/en-us
As for juggling drive letters into whatever order you want, the (free!) Windows Disk Management Tool is exactly what you're looking for: http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=180207718
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