NTFS vs FAT? disadvantages and advantages?

Question

please help me with this terms..i know when i will use these two...but i don't know the disadvantages and advantage of it...can you give me some basic advantages and disadvantages of each????

Answer 1

NTFS may be faster...

   - smaller RAM footprint as avoids large FAT held in RAM

   - indexed design more efficient for many files per directory

   - small file data embedded in dir level, avoids seek to data chain

   - above factors make fragmentation less onerous than for FATxx

   - 4k cluster size matches processor's natural paging size

...or slower...

   - extra overhead of security checks, compression, encryption

   - small clusters may fragment data cluster chains

NTFS may be safer...

   - transaction rollback cleanly undoes interrupted operations

   - file-level permissions can protect data against malware etc.

   - automatically "fixes" failing clusters on the fly (controversial)

...or more at risk...

   - no interactive file system checker (a la Scandisk) for NTFS

   - no maintenance OS for NTFS

   - malware can drill right through NTFS protection, e.g. Witty

   - transaction rollback does not preserve user data

   - transaction rollback does not help other causes of corruption

   - more limited range of maintenance tools

   - automatically "fixes" failing clusters on the fly (controversial)

NTFS may be more space-efficient...

   - smaller cluster size than FAT32 above 8G

   - may include data of small files within the directory level

   - NTFS's bitmap structure is smaller than FAT32's dual FAT

   - sparse files and compression can reduce data space usage

...or less so...

   - NTFS has large MFT structure

   - larger per-file directory metadata space

I would use NTFS where:

Users have professional-grade IT admin, including backup

Users need to hide data more than they need to salvage it

Applications require files over 4G in size

Hard drive exceeds the 137G barrier

But while NTFS has no maintenance OS from which...

Data can easily be recovered

File system structure can be manually checked and repaired

Malware can be scanned for and cleaned

...I would avoid the use of NTFS in consumer PCs.

Answer 2

NTFS is newer and as far as I know - FAT works slowier on Windows XP and newer OS. Of course, NTFS has much more functions.

Take a look at this web page:

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm