NTFS

[Joe Dynamite]

Hello. I currently have an external hard drive (FAT32). I saw a post by Dave which said you could only transfer 4gb to it. So I have been using MK2VOB to break it up. I play all my movies though my laptop and don't really need to convert them. If I format my HD can I transfer larger files? I had a quick look in the format options it said allocation unit size, which was 4096 bytes. Is that the maximum you can transfer? There were other options to make it larger.

[Chrissy Bee]

That 4096 bytes isn't about the max you can transfer (it's only 4kb!), it's basically the minimum size of a file on the disk, any smaller files will still take up that space. To be honest, it doesn't matter a great deal what you choose - but 4kb is perfectly sensible.

 

More info here: http://www.dansdata.com/io090.htm

[Joe Dynamite]

Thanks for the help. But if if I did change to ntfs could I transfer say a 6gb hd movie without breaking into 2 parts?

[Chrissy Bee]

Thanks for the help. But if if I did change to ntfs could I transfer say a 6gb hd movie without breaking into 2 parts?

 

Yep, the max size runs into terabytes (thousands of gigabytes).

[Joe Dynamite]

Thanks. Going to format it later.

[wacko]

The 4GB and 4096 bytes are two different limits. 4 GB is the maximum size for a single file because of hard limits of the FAT file system. The 4096 bytes is the size of a "sector" of the drive. When you format a disk it is formatted into sectors. A sector is the smallest unit of space a filesystem can use.

 

That means that a file can never use less than 4KB (with a 4096 byte sector size), and if a file is 5KB, it will use 8KB of disk space. So, if your drive is full of small text files, it's much more efficient to use smaller sectors, but if it's full of huge videos, larger sectors will provide better performance because there are fewer sectors in total and thus less overhead.

 

Unless you need to use the hard drive with non-Windows systems, you're probably better off using NTFS. It's a much, much better filesystem than FAT.

[Rob W]

make a backup before reformatting - there are some good utilities which will do it without wiping the disk but you can't be too careful.......................................

[Guest Lazlo]

Thanks. Going to format it later.

 

You didn't need to format. All you have to do is open a command window and type CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS and windows does it for you.

 

It doesnt work the other way though ntfs>fat32