[plethAURA]

I've looked this up on google, but I'd like to have a Mac users answer on which is better for combining with boot camp, what the trade-off is if any, etc. I've found that if you use something like Fusion and you have a NTFS partition you lose a feature? I'm very confused... any information would be wonderful

[Big Mac]

NTFS is the modern Windows FS. The only reason to go with FAT is if you really need to write to your Windows partition inside of OS X and don't want to install the free third party tools that enable NTFS write.

[ghporter]

NTFS is a more stable, more robust, more efficient file system than any FAT file system. The only drawback is that while OS X can natively read an NTFS partition, it can't write to one. At least not natively. For this reason, a lot of people have determined that to share stuff between OS X and Windows, they have to use FAT32 for their Boot Camp partition. They are wrong.

You can use MacFuse to write to an NTFS partition, and it's free. This sidesteps the problems that FAT32 has for hosting an OS, and makes it basically transparent to read and write to and from the Windows partition from OS X.

On the other hand, Windows can't even SEE a HFS+ partition. I understand that there are apps that let Windows see, read, and write Mac partition, but I don't have a name handy, and I've never used one.

[peeb]

FAT32 is ancient. Almost anything (mp3 players, old computers, etc etc) can read it, so it is good for sharing. It also has some serious shortcomings that make it bad for almost everything...

[ibook_steve]

I use FAT32 for my Boot Camp partition and MacDrive (mediafour.com; great program) to see my HFS+ partition and drives from Windows.

I would also like to know why NTFS is better than FAT32. What are the shortcomings of FAT32? I don't care about the 4GB file size limitation because I would never do anything in Windows that would require such large files. And I've had no problems with FAT32.

Steve

[shifuimam]

The primary limitations of FAT32 are the file size limits and the character limit on long file names.

NTFS provides some enterprise-type benefits, such as file compression and encryption, that are not present in FAT32.

For maximum accessibility, FAT32 is still the way to go - you can access it from any OS (including Linux, should you ever need to do serious file recovery stuff or something else). My desktop dual-boots XP and Ubuntu, and I have a 200GB data drive with 100GB NTFS and 100GB FAT32, for the best of both worlds. If you can have three partitions on your Mac, make OS X = HFS+ (duh), Windows = NTFS, and a third partition FAT32 for shared data between the two operating systems.

[Tomchu]

I would never trust 100 GB of my data to FAT32.

[peeb]

I wouldn't worry about that - FAT32 is very reliable in normal use - it is not a dubious filesystem at all, just not suited to the size of file we bandy around these days, and no journalling.

[ibook_steve]

Originally Posted by Tomchu 

I would never trust 100 GB of my data to FAT32.

OK. Why?

Steve

[Tomchu]

No journalling, and NTFS can recover from much more serious errors than FAT32 can.

I've lost data to FAT32 twice before in my lifetime. I've also lost data once or twice to ext2 and reiserfs, but never to XFS, HFS+, or NTFS.

[shifuimam]

Interestingly, I've lost data to HFS+.

FAT32 can't address bigger than about 120GB safely. It theoretically can handle anything now, but I've lost files on a 160GB drive that was FAT32-formatted.

My 100GB partition, though, has yet to see any issues, and I've had it configured this way for about a year now.

[64stang06]

I've even noticed speed differences between FAT32 and NTFS on WinXP. I believe NTFS is required for Vista.

[Tomchu]

shifuimam: I can address more than that safely. The problem is just that it was a filesystem developed in the days before anyone expected single hard drives to get this big.

And yeah, NTFS has some overhead that causes it to lose out to FAT32 in certain performance tests, but by far and large I've found NTFS to be quite "smooth" in performance, whereas FAT32 was really jerky -- some things would happen very quickly, others took forever.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by shifuimam 

Interestingly, I've lost data to HFS+.

So have I, and a good number of other people I know. HFS+ is far from being a highly reliable file system (although to be fair, the problems I've seen were mostly from the days before the Journaled variant of HFS+).

It's really a shame that Leopard didn't get native ZFS support, but

[badidea]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

You can use MacFuse to write to an NTFS partition, and it's free.

This never worked for me - is there anything special one has to do to make this work?

[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

It's really a shame that Leopard didn't get native ZFS support, but

I bet Apple's crafting some sort of hybrid between HFS and ZFS.

[mithridain]

Not that this matters, but in the Windows world, NTFS is more secure than FAT32.

[peeb]

More secure in what respect?

[Tomchu]

Originally Posted by peeb 

More secure in what respect?

ACLs, ownership, etc. ...

:-P

[shifuimam]

Originally Posted by Tomchu 

shifuimam: I can address more than that safely. The problem is just that it was a filesystem developed in the days before anyone expected single hard drives to get this big.

The last time I had a FAT32 volume >100GB was when I had a 160GB drive in my OptiPlex GX240 in like 2003...back then they shipped with a "Big Drive Enabler" CD-ROM, since pre-SP1 XP couldn't reliably handle large FAT32 volumes.

Even after SP1 and that software, though, files randomly disappeared, so I keep it under 100GB now, just to be safe.

[Tomchu]

That "Big Drive Enabler" had to do with 48-bit LBA addressing, and not filesystem support.

FAT32 can handle a maximum of about 268m clusters. That's that. :-P

Still, NTFS > FAT32, by far.

[olePigeon]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

You can use MacFuse to write to an NTFS partition, and it's free.

Here're the links:

MacFuse
NTFS-3G