Formatting HardDrives. NTFS/FAT? quick/slow?

WhiteFireDragon

WhiteFireDragon

New Member
1) when a hard drive is formated, it asks you to pick one of those formates for the HD. what is the difference?. i know most the time it's NTFS, but when do you use FAT?

2) also, what are the cons of choosing a quick format? it's so much faster but i'm guessing there has to be a drawback for there to be an option to do it slower.

3) how do i rename the letter of the drive? i have 2 running physical HDs, but 3 different partitions. i want it in order of C:\, D:\, E:\ but currently that is not the case since i have 2 other optical drives in there too. how do i rename all the HDs and two DVDs?

4) there is also an option for compression. would it be smart to enable this so that i can save space on the storage HD? what are the cons?
 
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normal format checks for bad sectors, the quick one does not
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That is the difference between a quick and full format. FAT generally is only used by older OSes now (ie windows 9x), although sometimes people use it for external drives to make it easy to share between windows/mac/unix.
 
ah ok. and thanks for the renaming link... just tried it and it works great. so what about the compression stuff? compressing it makes the HD unstable but saves space right?
 
Compressing the disk saves space, it's variable on how much because certain types of files compress better than others. Disk compression doesn't make the HD unstable it just slows the disk down because it has to compress/decompress a file every time it's used.
 
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