Problem with FAT32/NTFS?

[winstonsmith1978]

Ok, I'm just trying to figure out what the problem was with my HDD. I have an external USB Seagate HDD.

I was having problems backing up 10 gigs of files. I left it on for about 10 hours and it had about 40% to go. so i tried to figure out why a backup was taking so long, especially since the majority of the files had not changed since the last time.

I realized that my external drive was FAT32 and my main HDD was NTFS on Windows 2000. So i formated the external drive to be NTFS and then backed it up. It took 2 hours with no file errors. I use to get 10 or so file errors every backup.

So my question is, was the problem FAT32/NTFS or was it something else? I want to know what it could be so that it doesn't happen again. the only other thing i could think of, was a fragmented disc.

The other strange thing was that it would always re backup my mp3 in iTunes. But i haven't done anything new to these files for a long time. The back up software is BounceBack Express.

So what do you think the problem was?

 

[Bludd]

Maybe you were trying to backup files larger than 4 GB. FAT32 doesn't support that.

 

[winstonsmith1978]

Maybe you were trying to backup files larger than 4 GB. FAT32 doesn't support that.

The largest file was about 400-500MB. So i don't think that was the problem.

 

[Diplo]

If you do a full format of a disk it also runs a full scan disk and will try and repair any errors and will mark any bad sectors as unusable. So it's possible that your disk has some bad sectors and the format will have stopped these being written to, which will speed things up a lot. If your BIOS and HDs support SMART monitoring then use something like Disk Checkup to see what the SMART info reveal, as your disk may have problems.

 

[NANOTEC]

It shouldn't matter whether or not it's FAT32/NTFS because files can be copied between the two file systems without any problem. However it might be the culprit in your system due to the backup software. For example, if your backup software uses a cloning type backup procedure the two file systems may not be compatible.

 

[Frank]

You might have a single directory filled with very many files. FAT32 doesn't like that, and some software has a problem with that.

Then again, I would advise you to reformat it with something like fat32format.

Btw, all current harddisks do their own fault checking and repairing. There is never a need to do a full surface scan with those. If they go bad, they will notify you during boot, before they become unrecoverable. Checking the SMART status is what you should do instead.

 

[winstonsmith1978]

if your backup software uses a cloning type backup procedure the two file systems may not be compatible.

I'm a Newb. so i'm not sure what that means. I can explain what i do for backup -- I simply tell the software what files i want backed up, It makes exact copies of the files( no compression). Then. the next time i do a back up, the software is suppose to only back up the files that have changed from the earlier backup session.

either way, the drive is working fantastic now, i'm just not sure why.

 

[winstonsmith1978]

You might have a single directory filled with very many files. FAT32 doesn't like that, and some software has a problem with that.

Then again, I would advise you to reformat it with something like fat32format.

Btw, all current harddisks do their own fault checking and repairing. There is never a need to do a full surface scan with those. If they go bad, they will notify you during boot, before they become unrecoverable. Checking the SMART status is what you should do instead.

I already reformated as NTFS, so i'm not touching it unless something else goes wrong.

Thanks for all the help, I'm going do a scan of the HDD to see if there is any problem.