fat16, fat32 or ntfs?

[parmant]

I posted yesterday a question about Intel chipset 850E and ATTO card. It seems now that the problem comes from the ATTO card and the format of the scsi drives. Here is my experience: I decided to replace both my motherboard (from Intel to ASUS 1.4 Ghz) and my scsi controller (from Adaptec to ATTO). After having configured the bios of the motherboard and the ATTO EpressPCI DC scsi card following DIgi recommendations, I formatted my drives in FAT32 as recommended by Digi. No problem to read files, but when I tried to record, It took forever to begin recording and one time on 2, the record stopped and PT froze for a while (2mn or so). I checked hundred of times the ATTO config, the scsi termination, etc.. tried different options for the same result. I decided to put back my Adaptec controller: the problem didn't occur, but I still had this 2 or 3 seconds of waiting before the record began. I decided to re-format my drives in FAT16: NO MORE PROBLEMS!!!! I tried recording 32 tracks at a time, it worked perfectly. Thus I will keep this config for now, but of course I would prefar using my ATTO card, since i would get two scsi buses instead of one (my adaptec has got only one internal wide-connector) Did anybody experienced the same problems? Do you know if FAT16 gives less performance than FAT32 or NTFS? Thanks in advance for your contribution. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL>>

[Wolfgang Eller]

As I posted in the Mac forum: The ATTO EpressPCI DC card is not compatible with U320 LVD drives.
And right now you almost get no other new hard disc.
I would het rid of this card as soon as possible and would buy an ATTO UL3D.
It´s a joke that DIGI is still recommenting this obsolet card while everybody knows that U160 LVD is the last supported SCSI interface.

Merry Christmas

Wolfgang

[nukmusic]

I remember reading on a recording tips site about FAT16. It is surpose to work better(for audio drive only) than the others because of the larger partitions.

[steve at Your Heaven]

The tech guys at DD advised partitioning my 36GB scsi drive into 2 smaller parts, so that access is not across too large an area, which makes intuitive sense to me. They intimated that 18 Gb was ok (smaller not needed).

Keep in mind that while high track counts can work better when spread across 2 or more hard drives, it is WORSE to access 2 or more partitions on the same physical drive than to just use a single partition on a single drive - the seeks on the two partitions interfere with each other, and make access time a lot worse, according to DD.

[O.G. Killa]

The larger the file cluster size, the better for digital audio. Fat16 has a larger file cluster size than fat32 (fat16 is 32KB and fat32 is 4KB by default, I think?). That's why your problem went away!

Just in case you're wondering what file cluster size means...when you FDisk and format your hard drive, the drive gets divided into little tiny blocks that act like storage bins for data (as an analogy. This is what a file cluster is. This is one of the reasons why your hard drive always has less space on it after you format it. so now, if you have a 24KB file and you store that file on a fat32 drive, it will fill up 6 clusters and take 24KB of HD space. If it were on fat16, it would fill one cluster and take up 32KB of space (the last 8KB would be blank). Hard drives read one cluster at a time. So which would read faster? The fat16 would because in one motion the drive could read all 24KB instead of having to go through 6 motions to read the data. This is also why defragmenting your drive is so important. If the drive had to read 6 clusters spread very far apart on the disk it would be a lot slower than if the clusters were right next to one another. Defragmenting your drive rearranges the clusters so that a file's clusters are all contiguous to one another.

I believe programs like Partition Magic can change the cluster size of the drive when formating. If I remember correctly, fat32 can have variable cluster sizes, but Windows defaults to 4KB to make the most of its hard drive space. Likewise with NTFS. If you format the drive using Partition Magic you should be able to change the file cluster size to a larger number. And as a result the drive will be faster when dealing with larger files (like audio files). But Microsoft and several hard drive manufacturers don't recommend doing this on your main HD that the OS is installed on. Because there are so many small files that get used by the OS and other programs, they recommend leaving that with a relatively small cluster size (like the default 4KB).

Anyway, hope this helped.