THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA

You may not know this, but there are other OS's besides for Windows. FAT32 happens to be a faster file system and is the choice of many of the highest end servers (not windows).

Drive capacity is a pretty slippery thing.  The drive manufacturers tend to use numbers that "enhance" the size of their drives (like making it 1000kb = 1mb).  Then add the overhead of the file system where you lose a little more "available storage" and suddenly your 1/2 TB isn't...

As to file systems, FAT32 is more universally used so I guess it's a lowest common denominator thing.

You can convert from FAT32 to NTFS using the command line though:

convert D: /fs:ntfs

(where you can substitute D: for whatever drive letter the drive has set itself up on)

There's other options for the convert command (/? to view) which may be applicable.

David

According to the Wikipedia entry:

"As of 2006, most consumer hard drives are defined by their gigabyte-range capacities. The true capacity is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most hard disk manufacturers' definition of GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes (only computer memory has a natural inclination towards units that are powers of 2), most computer operating systems use the 1,073,741,824 byte definition." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabytes

>>I'm now packin' 4 gigs of a USB thumb drive.  

Hey, someone's got to figure out how to put one of those on the other side of a lipstick

RE: 1KB=1000 or 1024

This is an annoying thing. Back in the day, I recall that the binary versions (base 2) of the numbers were used for all storage and the SI versions (metric in Base 10) of the numbers were used for transfer rates. This was done, in part, for easy memory/storage alignment since the computer does everything in Base 2 internally. So for instance when I was working on DEC PDP 11's, 1KB of hard drive space was the same number of bytes as 1KB of RAM.

Then PC's started hitting big and for some reason[1] the PC Drive manufacturers decided to use the SI measures instead of binary measures so PC HDs are measured as 1KB=10^3 instead of 2^10. With 1KB, you lose about 2.3% (24 bytes). With 1MB you lose about 4.6%. With 1GB you lose 6.9%. When we hit TB measure we will be losing about 9.1% or 99511627776 bytes which would qualify as a  100GB drive.

 joe



[1] The easiest guess here is that they wanted to advertise bigger numbers than what they actually had. But don't put stupidity down for the count, maybe someone who was doing the early designs on PC harddrives really didn't have a clue and their screwup has come down through the years. Certainly the HD manufacturers like it now. It is false advertising that they can legally get away with.

The reason Windows NT (including all recent versions of Windows) does not support formatting FAT32 partitinos above a 32 gigabytes is not because they are so fast that Windows can't keep up. It is because the FAT32 file system is horribly inefficient on large partitions. Ray Chen had a great write-up on that in a recent issue of TechNet Magazine: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2006/07/WindowsConfidential/default.aspx

I just bought a computer, put it on my desk and it doesn't do anything!
What is Bill thinking?!?
I want my computer to tell me when I forgot my deoderant, dammit!

So, Susan ... which 500gb hard drive did you go with?

I think that you will find that your drive is 500Gb (with Gb defined per the postings above) *unformatted*.  This is the theoretical maximum capacity of the drive.

However, in real life, when it is formatted (FAT32, NTFS, or [gasp!] ExtFS), those pesky inter-sector gaps steal valuable but realistically unusable Mb's.

With hard disk capacity at less than 50c per Gb, I think that we are only discussing a matter of principle, anyway...

 I can't locate the kb but I think there is a potential issue with USB devices formatted with NTFS.

 It has to do with how often NTFS writes cached data to the disk.  FAT32 flushes the cache quickly where NTFS holds the data in cache for extended periods before writing it to the disk.

 Bottom line, Never Ever remove a USB drive formatted with NTFS without stopping it with Safely Removing Hardware first.

 I suspect that from a manufactures point of view FAT32 is safer for the general user base and therefore the default format.