i've always been happy with fat 32 so never really bothered converting the drives to ntfs, i was just wondering are the speed differences noticeable, and are there any other benifits, thanks...

Absolutely.

NTFS = New Technology File System...what can it do?

It makes use of your hard drive by way of smaller clusters per track... that in turn reduces hard drive wasted space.

NTFS allows the hard drive to access programs faster.

As for security...fat has none. NTFS has alot.

Want to add a new hard drive to your existing machine, and have it think its extended from the original? No problem - simple volumes allow this in the NTFS. You can extend a hard drive to another and make it appear as one large drive.

There is alot more...but its late and I am sure many others will add to this :-)

NTFS is great and has a lot of nice features... however, if you machine crashes and you have to boot from a boot disk.... you screwed unless you've got that NTFSDOS program.. not part of the standard boot disk.

For what i need my computer for, just stick with FAT32, unless your running critical systems or over a large network where file level security is important.

FAT32 for compatablility.

what more can i say.

thanks for the replies guys, shall have a little more look into it now..

No Problem, glad to help.

If a system using NTFS does crash, it can be repaired using either the boot disks you made right after you installed the system, (The first thing one should ALWAYS do when installing an OS) or even easier by booting from the installation cd and allowing a repair.

NTFS in my opinion is a more powerfull and definately more stable way of managing files on a system :)

If I used Windows (XP) alone, I would also go along with NTFS. However because Linux doesn't have a complete driver for NTFS I'm stuck with using FAT32.

Several bootmanagers work better when installed on fat32

if standalone system, FAT32.....unless u need security protection against your family members accessing your important files or data....

otherwise, i would go with the guys on NTFS (although more hassle when system crashes) with the network environment.

Just wondering why you dont partition your hard drive and then dual boot?