PCA Forums

I used to basically recommend using FAT32 for home users - and I still do for any partitions containing critical data.

Why? Because if your OS takes a dump, you can easily access the files on a FAT32 partition from a DOS boot floppy or Win98 (if you dual boot).

If the partition is formated in NTFS then you either have to first re-install Win2K/XP to access your files (which may take all day depending on the problem) or move the drive to another computer that's running Win2K or XP.

BUT I just started working on some large video projects for a client. Up until now I've only made relatively small video projects and never had to capture really large AVIs.

However, on this project I was running into a size limit problem when capturing long videos.

The problem is that FAT32 has an inherent 4Gb max file size limitation (and 4Gb is a pretty short video in RAW uncompressed AVI).

NTFS has a max file size limit of 4Tb (terrabytes!).

Needless to say I just reformatted my 20Gb video project partition in NTFS.

Yeap, I just discovered this problem last night. I have a copy of Spiderman in AVI format, and I want to convert it over to MPG so I can play it on my DvD player. During the conversion process, the program errored out saying that the drive has run out of space. It's a 20 giger with only a ~700 meg AVI file on it. I've been thinking about formatting it to NTFS to remove this limitation. Still thinking about it...