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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cheeky Kid who wrote (2053)	8/22/1998 1:10:00 AM
From: Sean W. Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Sire and All, I just read the the Windows 98 documentation on FAT32 and FAT32 converter and I don't see anything that disagrees with what I said. Here is everything in their docs hardcopy and online. I don't know where you are getting this information.... Maybe you can point out what were missing and explain the real world effects that many of us have witnessed after having used FAT32 for almost two years now on all my personal 95 boxes and my clients workstations. NOTE: My comments are bold italics or italics. MS docs are normal and bold only. From 98 Help Files... (FAT32) is an improved version of the File Allocation Table (FAT) that allows hard drives over two gigabytes to be formatted as a single drive. Drive Converter uses smaller clusters than FAT drives, resulting in more efficient space use. Windows 98 includes a graphical Drive Converter conversion utility, which quickly and safely converts a hard drive from the original FAT to FAT32. For more information about using Drive Converter, click here. Disk Defragmenter Using Drive Converter (FAT32) Drive Converter converts your drive to the FAT32 file system, an enhancement of the File Allocation Table (FAT or FAT16) file system format. When your drive is in this format, it stores data more efficiently, creating up to several hundred MB of extra disk space on the drive. In addition, programs load faster and your computer uses fewer system resources. to start Drive Converter (FAT32). Notes Youcan also start Drive Converter by clicking Start, pointing to Programs, pointing to Accessories, pointing to System Tools, and then clicking Drive Converter. Onceyou convert your hard drive to FAT32 format using Drive Converter, you cannot return to using the FAT16 format unless you repartition and reformat the FAT32 drive. If you converted the drive on which Windows 98 is installed, then you must reinstall Windows 98 after repartitioning the drive. Olderdisk compression software is not compatible with FAT32. If your drive is already compressed, you may not be able to convert to FAT32. Ifyou convert a removable disk and use the disk with other operating systems that are not FAT32-compatible, you cannot access the disk when running the other operating system. If your computer has a hibernate feature, the conversion may turn off this feature. See your computer documentation for details. More on this later on Because previous versions of Windows are not compatible with FAT32, you cannot uninstall Windows 98 after converting. *As everyone knows FAT32 works well with 95 SR2* Although most programs are not affected by the conversion from FAT16 to FAT32, some disk utilities that depend on FAT16 do not work with FAT32 drives. You will be prompted if you are running one of these utilities. Contact your disk utility manufacturer to see if there is an updated version that is compatible with FAT32. If you convert your hard drive to FAT32 using Drive Converter, you can no longer use dual boot to run earlier versions of Windows (Windows 95 [Version 4.00.950], Windows NT 3.x, Windows NT 4.0, and Windows 3.x). *this is also wrong, dual boot with 95 and 98 with FAT32 is easy* However, if you are on a network, earlier versions of Windows can still gain access to your FAT32 hard drive through the network. Freeing up disk space using Drive Converter (FAT32) or DriveSpace 3 Drive Converter (FAT32) converts your drives from the standard File Allocation Table (FAT) to FAT32, a very efficient system for storing files on large disk drives (over 512 MB). Converting to FAT32 may create some free disk space. Page 85 of the "Getting Started with Windows 98" also talks about FAT32 and states the following. The Table below illustrates the larger partition size and smaller cluster size available with FAT32 file system. Partitions larger than 2G are not supported via FAT16 and partitions smaller than 512M are not supported with FAT32. (this is not entirely true, you can create FAT32 on smaller disks) Parition Size FAT16 Cluster Size FAT32 Cluster <=32M 2K - <=128M 2K - <=256M 4K - <=512M 8K 4K <=1024M 16K 4K <=2048M 32K 4K 3G-7G -- 4K 8G-16G -- 8K .... etc.... Here is the line that is probably causing your incorrect assumption.I will show a mathmatical example later to prove this If your hard disk is smaller than 2G and your computer uses the FAT16 file system you may not see much improvement if you convert to FAT32. But you may want to convert to FAT32 if your disk is between 2G and 2 Terabytes and you want to improve its effiency.... The FAT32 file system has the following advantages over FAT16: -- It allows programs to open more quickly, on average 36% faster. -- It uses a smaller cluster size, resulting in more efficient use of disk space on average 28% more disk space. -- It allows a hard disk of up to 2TB to be formatted as a single drive, eliminitating the need to parition the disk. -- It can relocate the root directory and use backup copies of the FAT making your computer less vulnerable to crashes. *END OF MS DOCS* OK, now lets analyze some of these statements and we'll see where the misinterpretation arises.... MS Says "If your hard disk is smaller than 2G and your computer uses the FAT16 file system you may not see much improvement if you convert to FAT32." Here's a simple example to prove the point. Lets say we have an 800M FAT16 drive with ~8000 Files on it. (this is from one my pc's) 800M Drive uses 16K clusters. Exactly 1 cluster per file will not be completely full. The average amount of wasted space in the cluster will be the arithmetic mean or 8K Bytes. 8000 Files * 8K Bytes average wasted per file = 64M of Wasted Space Converting to FAT32 will reduce cluster size by default to 4K and result in 32M of less wasted space. There are also undocumented command line flags to FDISK that allow you to set cluster size as low 512 Bytes to further increase space usage efficiency and reduce wasted space to only 2M freeing 62M of disk space. For an 800M drive I would consider this substantial improvement. Perform the MATH on your FAT16 2G partition and you will see the # is trypically 200-400M or on average 28% diskspace according to MS. Hardly insignificant. MS also says "It allows programs to open more quickly, on average 36% faster." This is really deceiving because the speedup is not overall but only on application launch. This speedup has really nothing to do with FAT32 but with a new disk defragmenting technology MS licensed from Intel that interleaves different application files on the same track in the order they are typically loaded to minimize launch time. This only works with FAT32 because thats all they decided to write the driver for. There is no technical reason this couldn't be done with FAT16, or any other file system. Secondly this technique only works with Application files because they are static in size and in the relationship in time in which they are accessed during program launch. Notice MS doesn't claim FAT32 speeds up disk in general ONLY application launch. Not opening data files, not sequential or random access by any #. Why?? because it doesn't due to what is said above. Overall this is just a clever marketing ploy. Actual FAT32 disk performance in real world and synthetic benchmarks generally is 2-4% less than FAT16 as documented by many computer mags, Tom's Hardware page, & my own benchmarks. That said FAT32 is very advantageous for MOST users. The only true disadvantage I can think of is that mnay laptop's firmware cannot create a image file on a FAT32 to allow the notebooks to suspend. Most all Pentium Notebooks have this limitation. I cannot comment on the latest generation of PII notebooks. I imagine those shipping with 98 native have overcome this problem. For further information on the subject of disks, partitioning, etc. Powerquest's Partition Magic manual is probably the best presentation on the subject I have ever seen. Plenty of internet sites are full of good information such as Tom's hardware page. Class Dismissed, Sean