[WriteLog] Converting a disk to NTFS

[Bob McCormick W1QA]

> You have the real word on this now. I can see 
> only one reason for a home user to use NTFS. 
> That is the ability to control access to 
> files for user accounts. that MAY be a good 
> reason, even for me. It would prevent accidents. 
> Other than that, I see no reason for the home user.

I know the discussion of file systems et al is
off topic for this list.  But there seems to be
enough posts on it that I felt I may be able to
add some beneficial info - and try to tie it in
to our use of logging software / writelog.

Looking back at typical amateur radio setups,
we've seen folks stuck with using MS-DOS ...
or emulation of MS-DOS environments (in Windows 9X),
due to the kinds of programmes we run on our 
computers.  

I personally found this rather frustrating:
I used the CT program for a number of years 
but gave it up - as it just didn't integrate 
well into my current operating environment
(which is now all Windows XP based).  Therefore,
I think the questions in general about operating
systems, file system formats, etc. are justified ...

There are a lot of books written on file systems, 
including specifically NTFS.  I'll highlight a few 
things here, especially based on some prior posts:

FAT
- originally released with MS-DOS
- includes FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
- basic architecture circa 1977
- lacks security, capacity & reliability features
- performs better on 200 MB and under
- prone to fragmentation
- performance degrades with number of files

NTFS
- originally released with Windows NT
- journaled file system
- intelligent placement of file clusters
- less prone to corruption and fragmentation
- updated NTFS with Windows 2000 and XP
- better recovery from file & system errors
- long file names
- security & access control
- file compression
- file encryption
- indexing
- quotas
- Unicode file names
- performs better on 400 MB and over

Reports that FAT performs better than NTFS in 
general are not true.  NTFS has a LOT of enhancements
to optimise file and directory placement & retrieval.
Unless you've got a pretty small or old disk or slow 
processor (early Pentium II or before) NTFS should 
perform better than FAT - especially on the latest 
NTFS based operating systems and computers.

NTFS is a journaled file system.  It records all 
operations in a transaction journal.  If you have
a crash (or you reboot your system), upon reboot
when the drive is remounted uncommitted journal
transactions are applied.  NTFS has Unix like 
performance, with the reliability found on DEC's
OpenVMS operating system - with very quick
restart rebuild times.  

If your WriteLog computer hangs or needs to be
abnormally restarted during a contest ...
you'd probably do a lot better with your logs
on an NTFS disk, than a FAT disk!

An NTFS based system does a lot better job with
caching file and directory operations.  This may
be important in situations where WriteLog is being
run on a notebook - or in a network configuration.

There's only two reasons I can think of whereby
I can see running FAT:

- you need dual-boot for some reason
  (to boot into MS-DOS or Windows 9X), or

- you're running a legacy system, typically:
  - 8 GB disk or less
  - slower disks (like 5,400 rpm or less)
  - 64 MB memory or less
  - early Pentium II or less
  (in which case you should re-eval whether 
  you should be running an NTFS based operating
  system on a configuration like that anyway!)

As already posted, the file system that is used
on a volume is irrelevant from the application's
perspective.  If the application makes its file 
I/O calls to the operating system - the file system
should be totally transparent, especially for
any of the current amateur logging programs.

BTW: I've run WriteLog on nothing but NTFS
based systems (Windows XP Professional).

Additional information can be found in Microsoft
knowledge base articles:

 - Q100108 file system overview
 - Q310749 new features of NTFS 5.0

These can be found at: http://support.microsoft.com

Bob W1QA