External Harddrive - Reformatting?

[Takeru]

Originally Posted by miroku2192

Thanks! (are there any benefits switching to NTFS? [...]

NTFS allows file sizes up to 16EiB (16,000TiB) as well as compression, forks, encryption, journaling and other various features that are not available in a FAT system.

Journaling would be my main point to use NTFS for a Windows drive, mainly because if something goes completely wrong, there's at least a possibility of rescuing it.

[Capriccio]

Its also a good to note that if you use wish to use your external hard drive for the PS3 or Xbox360 to playback photos (jpg), music (mp3), or videos (limited to avi, mp4, and wma formats) unfortunately they have to be in FAT32 format, yeah its backwards for such a system. Disappointing lol.

[Tiberium Wolf]

Originally Posted by miroku2192

I see, that's fine. Thank you so much for all your help though, everything is NTFS now and I just copied over 200 gb worth of stuff...it's a bit slow though, was only going at 15 mb/sec? I thought USB could let it go faster...is there anything wrong I'm doing?

Maybe your files were fragmented so it was slow to copy.

[Syobon]

You can always use exFAT, its just FAT32 with larger file support.

[chikorita157]

Originally Posted by Syobon

You can always use exFAT, its just FAT32 with larger file support.

The problem is that exFAT is only compatible with Windows XP SP2, Vista SP1 and Windows 7... It's pretty much useless outside of that since most devices don't support it because of the licensing fee.