From: "Rich Gauszka" 


"Glenn Meadows"  wrote in message
news:41506353{at}w3.nls.net...
> Got this really weird observation.
>
> Copy a 2.8 gig audio folder (mixture of large files (music) and small
> (waveform display files)) from one USB 2 160 gig WD HD to another.  Drive
> Z
> is formatted Fat32, and Drive Y is formatted NTFS.
>
> Going from Z to Y (FAT32 to NTFS), it takes 7-12 minutes.  If I copy that
> folder BACK to Z (NTFS to FAT32) the copy takes about a minute or so.
> Copy
> it back once again (Z to Y), it takes about 4 minutes.  Once again, back
> to
> Z from Y, it's a minute or less.
>
> Is Fat32 THAT inefficient on copy functions?
>
> These are identical drives, external USB2 drives.  Seems really odd to me.
> The audio files are interleaved, and were recorded as the drive filled up
> from empty, so fragmentation should be minimal.
>
> Thoughts, comments, etc?
>
>

I would have expected a speed up when writing large files to an NTFS
partition. The opposite of what you are seeing

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/winpreinst/ntfs-preinstall.mspx
NTFS Performance

Disk subsystem performance is a critically important factor in overall
system performance, and NTFS is generally believed to be slower than FAT.
However, with a correctly created NTFS volume, NTFS performance
optimizations, and improved disk defragmentation, NTFS performance
(including the extra "journaling") is equivalent to FAT on small
disks and is faster than FAT on large disks.

Furthermore, NTFS performs well when reading, writing, and mounting large
volume sizes. FAT32 performance is reduced for volumes larger than 32 GB in
two areas:

      . Boot time with FAT32 is increased because of the time required to
read all of the FAT structure. This must be done to calculate the amount of
free space when the volume is mounted.

      . Read/write performance with FAT32 is affected because the file
system must determine the free space on the disk through the small views of
the massive FAT structure. This leads to inefficiencies in file allocation.


The following sections describe optimizations in Windows XP for disk
layout, Master File Table location, and cluster alignment for NTFS volumes.

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