My experience with NTFS differs from Mark's. I have been using it for
almost 10 years and have not had any problems. There is an advantage of
NTFS in how it allocates disk space. It does not use up entire clusters
for fragments of a file the way that FAT partitions do. Also, the disk
compression feature means that your transfer rate will go up - there are
fewer physical bytes to get off the disk. My system achieves about a 2:1
average compression. This means that my disk transfers should be nearly
twice as fast as without compression.

I don't know about other users, but my computer suffers from continual
disk bloat and I keep running out of space. The compression saves me
from upgrading disk quite as often! It is true, however, that you cannot
share the NTFS with a DOS boot, but I have not used DOS for so long that
I almost forget how to spell it;)

Just some thoughts from the other side.

Peter
____________________________________________________________
Peter Shkabara - Computer Science Instructor
Columbia College - 11600 Columbia College Drive - Sonora, CA 95370
(209) 588-5156 - [log in to unmask] - http://gocolumbia.org/pesh

-----Original Message-----
Maybe NTFS is more stable then FAT32 for huge file systems, that are up
24/7 for years on end, but not so a home user will ever notice. Here is
the big reason I don't recommend you do it. If you install NTFS you will
take a performance hit. Why? Because the extra security checks requires
two extra functions be performed every time a file is accessed. If you
don't need the administrative security capability, then why take the
performance hit?

Fewer utilities will work on a NTFS partition. This is why SystemWorks
is slower for you. In order to control stability,  NT4, Win2K, XP will
not allow software to directly access hardware. Add the security checks
of NTFS and you will have even slower, less capable disk utilities.

NTFS allows you to do compression on the fly but with todays cheap huge
hard drives this is a meaningless tool. Another negative is that you
will not be able to access the partition from a DOS boot disk. This
means that when things go wrong they can get terminal really fast, and
if you have data stored on the drive you will need to access it with
another OS that supports NTFS.

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