NT - Fat16 vs Fat32 vs NTFS


Finally I have gotten around to running these tests! The catalyst for the tests was my purchase of  Winternals Fat32 driver for NT.  I wanted to see if there was going to be a performance penalty in using FAT32 for workhorse drives in NT.   While NTFS is great for security, it really is a pain if you want to share data on the same computer with Win95/98 and not waste a lot of space to Fat16.  Hope these results are of use to you!

Test Specs

H/W config AsusTX-97X, P225MMX, 96MB
Onboard Busmastering EIDE Controller, IBM Deskstar 5 UDMA H/D, Quantum Fireball ST UDMA H/D
S/W config NT4, SP3, Intel 2.01.3 busmastering driver
NT Booted from Deskstar Drive.
H/D config Deskstar 5 UDMA Primary channel master
Quantum ST UDMA Primary channel slave (test drive)
Formatted with default cluster sizes for all file system types (1.6GB H/D)
Fat16 - 32K, Fat32 - 4K, NTFS - 2K

Threadmark
config

Version 2 used.
Both drives tested twice, the results averaged.

Overall Results

Filesystem

Fat16

Fat32

NTFS

Overall

5.87 MB/s

5.83 MB/s

4.96 MB/s

Total CPU

18.54%

17.89%

16.79%
Aver CPU/MB

3.16%/MB transferred

3.07%/MB transferred

3.39%/MB transferred

Graphs and Conclusion

I have plotted graph displaying the relative loss of performance of Fat32 and NTFS compared to Fat16 under NT4.  This is for a 1.6GB partition.

wpe2.jpg (15327 bytes)

As you can see there is a performance penalty of around 15% when using the NT File System, when compared to Fat16/Fat32.  The Winternals Fat32 driver performed without fault, and has no speed penalty when compared to the native Fat16 performance in NT.   I would have to recommend it!