If you move from Win9x to NT or Win2000, an obvious question is what advantage does NTFS offer over FAT16 (available under NT) or FAT32 (available under W2K).

• Performance
  Q100108 kb article notes that "when using drives or partitions of over 200 MB the FAT file system should not be used. This is because as the size of the volume increases, performance with FAT will quickly decrease."

  The Diskeeper folks published some performance results. NTFS was fastest followed by FAT and then FAT32. The best cluster size was 4K. 512byte clusters (default for fat32) was worst. They found that a disk intensive task moved "from FAT-32 512-byte clusters to NTFS 4K-byte clusters makes the job run in one fifth the time!"

• Security
  If the operating system is running, NTFS offers significant protection. NTFS offers object permissions that give you very granular control over file and folder access, both for local users and those who access your system across the network. Unfortunately, if you don't control physical access to the console, anyone with a DOS boot diskette with NTFSDOS or FAT32 driver can peruse any file (if they can boot the PC). The security controls available under NTFS at a file or folder level are significant for remote access in any case. If you don't control physical access to the PC, there is no security irregardless of partition type. If you do, NTFS has granular access control, FAT does not.
• Recycle Bins
  FAT partitions have a single Recycle Bin, regardless of the current logon account. Under NTFS, each user has a unique Recycle Bin. This is a decent barrier unless everyone is running as workstation admin, then it is not a decent barrier to snooping. If this is your situation, don't send sensitive files to the Recycle Bin.
• Recoverability
  NTFS provides the ability to recover from file system errors and perform sector sparing to remap data to good clusters and mark bad clusters as unusable. Using a method called hot fixing, every storage device write is monitored and written sectors are checked for integrity. If the verification fails, the corrupted or questionable sectors are flagged, and the data is rewritten to another sector(s) on the disk. Sector hot fixing is performed automatically by the file system and does not report error messages to any applications. NTFS also logs all changes to the file system so that changes may be undone or reapplied if a discrepancy is found or if a system failure or power loss causes damage.
• Compression
  NTFS does it transparently if the option is selected. FAT does not support it; even FAT32 doesn't do it at all in Windows 2000.
• Encryption
  NTFS does it transparently if the option is selected in W2K. Not available if partition is FAT16 or FAT32. Not available in Windows NT thus not a difference for Windows NT, only Windows 2000.
• Disk quotas (server issue)
  NTFS needed for 3rd party quota tools under NT and for capability in W2K.

Covers installation and support of NT Workstation. If you are just getting into NT workstation, its a good book. If you are experienced NT techie, forget it.