This is my very first post, so if I’ve done it incorrectly, please be gentle…
I am not very handy with computers (or even with message boards), and I need some advice. I have a 5 year old computer with a 13 gig hard drive running Windows XP and using the FAT32 file system. I’ve filled up the 13 gig hard drive, so I added a second 160 gig hard drive (as a “slave”) and formatted it using the NTFS file system (when it came time to format the new hard drive, this was the choice that was pre-selected). I want this additional hard drive to store all my files and just use the master hard drive for programs. I started trying to drag and drop files into the new hard drive and noticed that it wasn’t actually moving the files - it was just putting copies of the files onto the second hard drive. I assume this is because the two file systems are different…not sure if that is correct, though.
So my questions is should I just reformat that second hard drive to FAT32 so that both drives use the same file system? I know just enough about computers to understand what I’m asking…I may or may not understand your answers, but I really appreciate any help you can offer!
If you’re using XP or 2000, NTFS is really the only way to go. FAT32 limits files to 4GB max, so you couldn’t put any DVD images on there, for example. There is also a HD size limit I believe. Copying vs. moving has nothing to do with the file system. If you want to move a file, drag them with the right mouse button and pick move instead of copy.
An NTFS drive is more efficient at storage than a FAT32 drive.
I suggest you follow this Microsoft support notice and use XP’s built-in converter to convert you master drive to NTFS and the move your data files to the slave drive.
Drag-and-drop copying files has nothing to do with what filesystem is used on each drive. Well, I’d hope so, anyway. There’s no good reason for Microsoft to do things that way.
NTFS is superior. There’s no reason not to use it unless you’re running an OS that can’t read NTFS. Now, given that you’ve probably got tons of data, including your operating system installation, on the FAT32 drive I wouldn’t recommend changing it. But it won’t hurt your computer to have one drive use FAT32 and another use NTFS.
To give a really crude analogy, it’s kind of like having all of your documents in one language on one drive and a different language on the other. Windows XP is perfectly bilingual, so it doesn’t particularly care which “language” is used on each drive.
It’s been a while since I’ve worked with FAT32, so I may be a little off in terms of numbers, but you will definitely want to stick with NTFS, because it’s just a lot better. A lot of the advantages you probably don’t care about, but there are some you might. For instance, it uses smaller clusters which results in less fragmentation (ie, more efficient use of the drive space).
It also has features that allow for addressing larger files and larger devices. For instance, IIRC, the upper limit of FAT32 is less than 160GB (4GB, I think), so if you did format it as FAT32 you’d have to make multiple partitions to make use of the entire disk.
Depending on what kind of files you are storing, it also has much better security features.
I think your issue is simply the way you’re doing your file transfer. Dragging and dropping across partitions under Windows will generally result in a copy, not a cut-paste. Depending on the quantity and type of files, you may either want to cut-paste or find a freeware data migration tool.
In fact, if you’re moving all you’re data now and you’re still running XP on FAT32, it might be a good opportunity to back up your system and rebuild on an NTFS partition; you’re probably see a noticable improvement in performance.
I would use NTFS only, not FAT32 for either. Some of the extra information XP puts on a NTFS file system, can’t be stored on a FAT32 system. Format to the smallest allocation unit size you can, 512 most likely. The next size up is 1024. The minimum file size is what ever size you format under, so after a while all these files take up more space on the 1024 unit then the 512 unit partition.
Analogy: Think of it as having a bin for storage. You can have 10 small sections that hold 1 cup, or 5 sections that hold 2 cups. You have half a cup of sand. You take up one section in either arrangement. The first bin has 9 sections left for storage. The second bin only has 4 sections left for storage.
As for it only copied the files, I have seen it happen. I can not however think of the exact circumstance during which it occurs. It’s safer to copy than to move files across drives. In the case of a computer glitch, then you can recopy to the new drive to be sure a file wasn’t damaged when the computer died. In the case of moves that go from sub directory to a different one on the same drive, the move has almost no chance of a problem, and happens in an instant.
So by using the verbose mode, I lose the first post honors by a lot. Drat and double drat.
A minor nit-pick since it was brought up, moving a file to a different directory within the same partition takes constant time [O(1)] because it is simply rewriting the file table. It is much slower [O(n)] to copy files within the same partition because it has to create a new file table entry, then duplicate the file. Copying across partitions is even slower, depending on their proximity (ie, high speed bus, external, network, etc.). Moving, however, is not analogous because you can’t just rewrite a file table, so to “move” across partitions, it’s identical to copying then deleting the source.
If I were to hypothesize, I’d guess Microsoft made an assumption that any drag-drop within the same partition is most likely intended to be a move (since you generally don’t want multiple copies in the same partition, plus it’s much faster and easier) and drag-drops across partitions are most likely copies since, as you mentioned, it’s safer and functionally equivalent minus a deletion of the source.
If you really care about your data’s integrity (which I imagine you do, or you wouldn’t move it), on second though, unless you have access to a data migration tool, you’re better off copying, verifying, then deleting rather than cut-paste or move.
Not quite. The upper limit on a FAT32 partition is 8TB (originally 2TB), with an upper filesize of 4GB. However Windows XP and Vista won’t allow you to create a FAT32 partition larger than 32 GB.