Bad sectors and NTFS

Recovering from disaster

from JoeUser Forums

I really don't like NTFS that much. I use it typically but I must admit that I find myself moving more and more to FAT32. Which is really pathetic. I used to be one of those people who espoused NTFS (and I still do for SERVERS) because of the security features, the encryption, the per folder compression, the disaster recovery, etc.

But as time has gone on, I've come to realize that NTFS is just a pain in the ass if anything goes wrong with it. There are good recovery tools that deal okay with NTFS but there's nothing quite like just booting up with a CD and being able to use good old DOS to do what needs to be done in the event of a screwed up OS.  There is also the nagging feeling that NTFS just gets slower and slower as you use it. If you're a NTFS techie, you probably know what I mean -- the increasing boot times because of NTFS going to its various hidden system directories with names with $'s in them.  Slowly, but surely, the system will fill like the hard drive has to crunch for every little thing.

My main machine suffered a serious problem over the weekend. Not sure why or how. But it ended up me requiring to basically restart on it from scratch (that's not completely true, I could have spent more time tryiing to salvage my existing OS setup but I chose to start from scratch).  Basically what happened is that my hard drive got a few bad sectors on it. I'm not sure how. But it did. It probably had them for a long while. But I did a defrag on the system and apparently some data was put onto one of those bad sectors.  As a result, the system just wouldn't boot up right.  NTFS may be more resilient (in theory anyway, in practice I've not seen this) but even it apparently can't deal with a couple of bad sectors.  But when it came to recover, it was just a total pain because most utilities don't deal well with NTFS.  I ended up using a special recovery tool that did deal okay with NTFS and got my critical files off there.

But this time, when I started from scratch, I went to FAT32. The difference has been noticeable, particularly in boot up.  NTFS wastes less space on today's hard drives than FAT32 do to FAT32's clusters. But I don't really care. Performance matters and NTFS just doesn't seem to cut it when it comes to performance over time.

My main work machine remains NTFS since the security features on it are absolutely critical (I don't keep sensitive material on the laptop). But still, NTFS on Windows XP just doesn't seem that impressive. File systems, caching, and others features seemed to have stopped evolving whenthe OS/2 vs. NT wars ended. Which is a pity.

So here's to FAT32. An update of a fairly cheesy file system that still does the job.

6,515 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from JoeUser Forums Top
This is an interesting observation. I take it that this is on the laptop, yes? How big is the hard drive on that thing (micro drives aren't exactly known for their performance). I'd be curious to get your feedback on how much of a performance increase your noticing (nothing scientific, give me a rough feel in percent). I've been running XP Pro with NTFS on a Western Digital 120GB 8MB 7200RPM drive, and I consistently have boot times of about 20 seconds or so. The performance seems acceptable, although it's been about four years since I used FAT32 as my filesystem. Seeing as how it's been about two years since my last system refresh, I might be willing to try an experiment and see what would happen if I reverted back to FAT32.
Reply #2 from JoeUser Forums Top
This is an interesting observation. I take it that this is on the laptop, yes? How big is the hard drive on that thing (micro drives aren't exactly known for their performance). I'd be curious to get your feedback on how much of a performance increase your noticing (nothing scientific, give me a rough feel in percent). I've been running XP Pro with NTFS on a Western Digital 120GB 8MB 7200RPM drive, and I consistently have boot times of about 20 seconds or so. The performance seems acceptable, although it's been about four years since I used FAT32 as my filesystem. Seeing as how it's been about two years since my last system refresh, I might be willing to try an experiment and see what would happen if I reverted back to FAT32.
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Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top
Hm... So that is why my laptop is booting more slowly over time. I alway thought that the reason was that the registry expands as more and more applications are installed.

Do anyone know if there are alternative filesystems available for XP? On Linux you have a multitude of options and EXT3, ReiserFS and JFS are still in development.
Reply #4 from JoeUser Forums Top
I use EXT3 under Linux and Windows 2000, and it works well with both (decent drivers for Windows to use this are not free, unfortunately). The neat thing about ext3 is it's journaling feature. I've never corrupted a single file, even when the power went off suddenly while writing to disk. Corruption recovery is more or less automatic.
Reply #5 from JoeUser Forums Top
jelvis, did you defrag the drive? My laptop was getting slow, and defrag was a nightmare 8 hours long. It was so badly fragged. but after that, it ram much faster and smoothly.

Brad, that's odd, because NTFS is supposed to recover from bad sectors?