I really don't like NTFS that much. I use it typically but I must admit that I find myself moving more and more to FAT32. Which is really pathetic. I used to be one of those people who espoused NTFS (and I still do for SERVERS) because of the security features, the encryption, the per folder compression, the disaster recovery, etc.

But as time has gone on, I've come to realize that NTFS is just a pain in the ass if anything goes wrong with it. There are good recovery tools that deal okay with NTFS but there's nothing quite like just booting up with a CD and being able to use good old DOS to do what needs to be done in the event of a screwed up OS.  There is also the nagging feeling that NTFS just gets slower and slower as you use it. If you're a NTFS techie, you probably know what I mean -- the increasing boot times because of NTFS going to its various hidden system directories with names with $'s in them.  Slowly, but surely, the system will fill like the hard drive has to crunch for every little thing.

My main machine suffered a serious problem over the weekend. Not sure why or how. But it ended up me requiring to basically restart on it from scratch (that's not completely true, I could have spent more time tryiing to salvage my existing OS setup but I chose to start from scratch).  Basically what happened is that my hard drive got a few bad sectors on it. I'm not sure how. But it did. It probably had them for a long while. But I did a defrag on the system and apparently some data was put onto one of those bad sectors.  As a result, the system just wouldn't boot up right.  NTFS may be more resilient (in theory anyway, in practice I've not seen this) but even it apparently can't deal with a couple of bad sectors.  But when it came to recover, it was just a total pain because most utilities don't deal well with NTFS.  I ended up using a special recovery tool that did deal okay with NTFS and got my critical files off there.

But this time, when I started from scratch, I went to FAT32. The difference has been noticeable, particularly in boot up.  NTFS wastes less space on today's hard drives than FAT32 do to FAT32's clusters. But I don't really care. Performance matters and NTFS just doesn't seem to cut it when it comes to performance over time.

My main work machine remains NTFS since the security features on it are absolutely critical (I don't keep sensitive material on the laptop). But still, NTFS on Windows XP just doesn't seem that impressive. File systems, caching, and others features seemed to have stopped evolving whenthe OS/2 vs. NT wars ended. Which is a pity.

So here's to FAT32. An update of a fairly cheesy file system that still does the job.