NTFS or FAT32 with External Hard Drive?

Decide yourself . Read the pros and cons of each of them .

NTFS vs. FAT: Which Is Right for You?
FAT32 or NTFS: Making the Choice

Yep im going for NTFS with the external hard drive cause it is consistent with the machine it is being copied from - which is NTFS.

* It seems that I can reformat the drive from FAT32 > NTFS without much of an issue - is that true? Anyone done that?

Thanks!

I would format it as NTFS as this will enable you to make the most efficient use of the disk capacity. True, you can format as FAT32, but you will be wasting a lot of disk space.

A FAT32 volume consists of 2^32 clusters (a cluster being the smallest unit on a disk). Depending on the size of the disk, a cluster can range from 4KB to 32KB or even 64KB. NTFS volumes, on the otherhand, maintain a cluster size of 4KB throughout.

Let's suppose that you have a 1KB file that you wish to save to the disk. With a FAT32 formatted disk with 32KB clusters, the wasted space is 32 - 1 = 31KB (remember that a cluster is the smallest unit on the disk that can be written to or read from). The same disk, formatted to NTFS with 4KB clusters, wastes just 3KB (4 - 1 = 3KB). This is a difference of 31 - 3 = 28KB on that single file alone, and, on a large HDD with many small files, this wasted space can add up to a significant amount.

cool thanks for that - apparently it is simple for me to change from the existing FAT32 to NTFS - will existing date be wiped from the drive if I do this change?

Thanks!

As far as i am aware all data would be lost, i have used Download SwissKnife (free)

there maybe better ones out there but thats just what i know of.

That's not true. You can change the format from FAT32 to NTFS without any data loss (as long as there is enough free space on that drive).
Only if you'd ever wanted to go back there wouldn't be a way of doing that without data loss (which means have a backup handy)

Make use of Brink's excellent tuts:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/11106-convert-fat-fat32-volume-ntfs.html

Don't worry about the space...it'll tell you if it's not enough. Much more important: Once it's started, leave it alone unless you want to create a very expensive paperweight ...mine looked like it was crashed half way through .

My 1TB drive which was filled to about 2/3 took ~4.5 minutes to convert

-DG

The main reason to go to NTFS is for larger files support. Fat32 has a max file size limit of 4GB.
I didn't see this listed in either of the 2 articles posted above.

The reason you cannot store a Windows 7 image on the FAT32 drive is because it has a max file size limit of 4GB. You have to use NTFS if you want a single file over 4GB in size.

Edit: Whoops, not sure how I didn't see the person above me who posted this already.

Windows 7 Also makes judicious use of hardlinks, compression, permissions and tons of other NTFS features which fat simply doesn't have