Which is Faster FAT32 or NTFS?

Technical stuff for non-technical people. Enjoy.

When you are about to format an internal drive, external drive, USB flash drive, or SD card, Windows gives three different file systems options: NTFS, FAT32, and exFAT.

First of all, as we all know NTFS and FAT are both file systems.

File system: It contains a collection of algorithms and data structures that perform the translation from logical file operations to actual physical storage of information. In computing, a file system determines how data is stored and retrieved.

Without using the file system, information stored in a storage medium is useless with no means to know where one piece of information stops and the next one begins.

What is FAT32 & NTFS format?

FAT32 is the most common version of the FAT (File Allocation Table) file system, created by Microsoft in 1977. FAT32 is one of the oldest of the three file systems available to Windows, so it is not as efficient or advanced as NTFS &exFAT.

It uses the File Allocation Table to describe the allocation stats of the clusters in a file system and the link relationship between each. Also, FAT32 is an upgraded version of FAT16 designed to overcome the limitations of FAT16 and add support for larger media.

NTFS stands for New Technology File System. It was developed by Microsoft in 1993. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family. It is introduced as a replacement for the FAT file system; NTFS is packed with modern features not available to FAT32 and exFAT. NTFS supports file permissions for security, a change journal that can help quickly recover errors if your computer crashes, shadow copies for backups, encryption, disk quota limits, hard links, and various other features

Which is Faster?

If we are comparing the file system in the parameter of data transfer speed, NTFS is tested to be faster than FAT32 as it is more advanced than FAT32. However, the data transfer speed depends on many other factors including the drive technology like HDD, SDD, flash NTFS file system has been tested to be faster than FAT32 on most benchmarks. Both file systems have their own advantages, there is no clear-cut answer to it.

If you need the disk for a Windows-only environment, NTFS is the best choice. If you want to exchange files (even occasionally) with a non-Windows system like a Mac or Linux, then FAT32 will give you fewer problems, as long as your file sizes are smaller than 4GB.

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