From: firstlast{at}compuserve.com.omit (John Beckett)

As a matter of interest, when XP and W2003 systems convert a FAT partition
to NTFS, the result has 4K clusters. There may well be other, more sublte,
benefits from a native-formatted NTFS partition, but cluster size is now
set appropriately during a conversion.

Here are some extracts from an evaluation Windows Server 2003:

C:\>chkdsk e:
The type of the file system is FAT. 2,097,152,000 bytes total disk space.
2,097,152,000 bytes available on disk.
       32,768 bytes in each allocation unit.
       64,000 total allocation units on disk.
       64,000 allocation units available on disk.

C:\>convert e: /fs:ntfs

C:\>chkdsk e:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
   2048287 KB total disk space.
      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
    512071 total allocation units on disk.
    508867 allocation units available on disk.

John


On Wed, 14 May 2003 16:27:23 -0700, "Rich"  wrote:
>   A native formatted NTFS partition is better than one converted from
>FAT/FAT32 both in efficiency and security.  The security can be updated
>by applying the appropriate security template.  I think Windows XP may
>have changed the upgrade behavior so that security is the same as a
>clean NTFS install but the efficiency issue still applies.
>
>   As for format than install vs. install then format, I meant to format
>during install, an option in Windows setup.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-4