Shoutbox

We got an external Hard Drive today, it is 250GB USB2 blah blah...

it says it is preformatted in Fat 32 format, do you think it would be worth converting it into NTFS?

Absolutely.

Edit: Unless you want use it under linux, too.

ok, also, what are the advantages of NTFS over FAT32?

That weird you should post this, i just got my EXT HDD working that hasnt worked for a year, I say I just got it working, infact instinct made me try and it worked, I bought it for my laptop but I don't have that now, it's even got all the macromedia software I installed on it, that I gave away with the laptop, I aint even got the serials to them now, (would it be illegle for me to use them if i got the serials from somewhere else, even though I paid for them?)

NTFS yes certainly.

Advantages

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• Increased Security
  
• file–by–file compression
  
• quotas
  
• encryption

see NTFS or FAT32 for an external drive?

thankyou, I think I will format it to NTFS, my dad is using it for video editing, so it is quite likely that some files will be larger than 4GB.

How long would it take for 250GB to format?

A quick format will take less that a minute. A full format will take much longer.

A quick format is equivalant to editing only the table of contents of a book but leaving the information left on the pages (disk), rather than erasing every page and writing "I'm blank!" on each sector of the disk.

This is normally the best solution, except if selling (or giving away) a disk, because after a quick format, the data can be recovered using advanced tools, even though for most practical purposes the data is gone.

The disk is already empty, i want to convert it from FAT32, to NTFS. It is a brand new hard drive.

If it is empty, don't convert it, just remove the FAT32 partition and create a new NTFS partition. It should be very quick (more time taken instructing your management program than actual work done on the disk).