Tuesday 7 January 2014

Which file system is the best for SSD Partition - NTFS or FAT32

While creating partitions in SSD drive a very obvious question that arise is which is better for SSD file system – FAT32 or NTFS.
Here we are discussing the point and trying to find the best answer for it.
Would it be better to prefer FAT32 file system to NTFS for an internal SSD drive?

You would have learnt many times that NTFS is more flexible and smarter with read/write operations than FAT32 and thus is doubted to cause reduction of longevity of SSD. But that is not the only reason for moving to FAT32 but backup support and portability also count more.
There is no native utility for NTFS -> FAT32, but it can be done via some third party tools like AOMEI.

1.) Does it work? Yes
2.) Is it reliable? Yes
3.) Does it work with files greater than 4GB also? No
4.) Would it be better to use the FAT32 file system for a data partition? (Yes/No)

FAT32 is a less safer than NTFS because there is no concept of journaling in FAT. Let me explain the fact. Absence of journaling means that in case of some  power loss, BSOD (Blue screen of death), or other unexpected interruptions during writing data, the file system can reach some inconsistent state and ultimately cause a data loss. NTFS can also lose your data but it will leave you to the most recent consistent state so that your files still work, even if not with the most recent contents. On the contrary, FAT32 breaks and lets you to a stage with corrupt data.
NTFS takes care of performance degradation and does not do a significant   amount of extra writing to the SSD.

So, we recommend that it’s not a good idea to use FAT32 unless you have a very unusual workload. Here, the unusual means high volume of saturated writing task to the disk.
Please note that there is no file system or OS in the universe, which can protect your drive from being failed. So, always keep a valid backup of your drive and in case you have lost your data due to hard drive crash, there is a good option for data recovery software, independent of OS you are working with.

Windows data recovery software
Mac data recovery software

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