FAT or NTFS?

Several readers have asked whether it's better to install Windows 2000
Professional using an NTFS partition, or a FAT32 partition. It all
depends on what you need to do. If you're using a relatively small hard
disk, FAT32 may well prove faster than NTFS; this is true whether you
use Windows NT 4.0 Workstation or Windows 2000 Professional. However,
since large hard disks are the rule these days, this is probably not a
factor for you.

If you decided to use FAT32 to make dual booting with Windows 9x
easier, remember that you will lose the increased security that NTFS
offers. You can't create volume extensions, striped volumes, etc....
unless you use NTFS. We suggest that you use NTFS on any hard disk
above 2 GB. You probably lose any speed advantage from FAT32 even
before you reach the 2 GB mark.

If you want to dual boot between Windows 2000 Professional and Windows
9x, use NTFS anyway. You can see the Windows 9x FAT32 partition from
Windows 2000 Professional, and you can arrange your partitions to
accommodate files that you need to share. We run Windows 2000
Professional on the first partition of Drive 0 and Windows 98 on the
second partition. On Drive 1, we run Windows NT 4.0 Workstation on the
first partition (using BootIt NG) and format the second partition using
FAT32. This allows us to use all these folders from either Windows 2000
Professional or Windows 98.