Layman Bod here. I'm just about to install Premiere and Bravado DV2000, and have come across this FAT32 thing.
Is it worth doing this? Will it cause me any unforeseen problems later?
I also intend to partition the hard disk (10 EIDE) with Premiere at the 'other end,' drive F as I understand it is prudent to keep it separate, and Drive E for catured video.
Am I on the right track. It sounds straightforward enough, but being paranoid and new at this I thought I'd pick some brains.
Al
Pentium 2 / Win98 / 10gig EIDE / 64RAM
Premiere 5.1 / MotoDV
Sony TRV900
FAT32 has two main advantages over FAT16 - support for partitions over 2GB, and less wasted space on partitions up to 2GB. The reduction is wasted space is because of smaller clusters, but for writing large files at high-speed (e.g. AVI) large clusters are actually better.
Your best investment is a copy of Partition Magic. This enables you to mess around with the partitioning, change sizes, copy, switch formats & cluster sizes etc, all without ever re-formatting or losing your data. You can choose what cluster size to use on FAT32 partitions, you can even create 4GB FAT16 partitions using 64KB clusters. These are technically only supported on NT, but they also work on Win9x provided you don't set up the system partition this way, or expect Scandisk to work on them. But they work great for AVI files.
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Richard Jones
So based on this then, is it better to format drives under NT to FAT16 or NTFS - do the same rules apply?
cheers,
Jon
A similar argument applies re NTFS, only in some ways more so. NTFS is far more complex than FAT, since in particular it is a secure filesystem (i.e. every file has an owner, access rights, etc). This means there is a larger system overhead reading & writing NTFS files, so for raw speed FAT is still faster on NT. However, until Win 2000 comes out (or you want to buy beta 3!) you can't use FAT32 on NT. So if you need more than 4GB on a partition you have no choice but NTFS.
Personally if I were to use NT I'd stick to FAT partitions for video. (I do use NT, but professionally for software work, not video). I'm in fact much happier with Win9x on a desktop system where security and network management is not an issue. NT crashes too, but 9x is faster to re-boot and easier to recover from anything serious.
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Richard Jones
Not true, you can use FAT32 on NT4. You can buy a FAT32 driver from winternals.com for about 30 quid.
You will still need a copy of 98 hanging around as the driver does not support formatting, checking or defragging.
I have this and it works well :)
Ned
Have just added an 18GB secondary drive to my Gateway G6/350 to use purely for video editing (Bravado DV2000/Prem5). It has 'configured itself' as 4 x 1.99GB partitions! What I want is 1 x 18GB - sounds like I need Partition Magic as discussed above. Where can I buy it chaps?
I've jsut ordered it from Simply Computers - a friend was going to bring it from USA - but in fact it's only a couple of quid cheaper from there - so he didn't bother. Did I say friend?
simply.co.uk - and they dont charge for delivery if you order online.
Their product code SU5151 £41+vat
D