Acronis True Image: FAT 32 or NTFS

Question

My 80 GB hard drive is NTFS. My external drive comes in FAT 32. Do I need to make both file systems the same before I create an exact image using Acronis? When I leave the external as FAT 32, it takes 2 hours for backup, but when I format it to NTFS, it takes 5 hours!! Why? For Acronis, which system should I use? Thanks

bacillus · Answer

If you will only be using your external hard drive with Windows 2000 and XP systems then I would suggest you use NTFS as it is more robust and does not suffer with the 4GB file limit that fat 32 has.

Ed C · Answer

Are you backing up, imaging, both drives at the same time and storing the image on the external drive???   Does your notebook have USB2 or is it just 1.1??? Hard to tell when you never posted the model number of your notebook.   Is the external drive USB2, that is IS is running at USB2 speeds?   If you are trying to image both drives and storing that image on the external drive that could be the problem for the image to take so long no matter what file system you're using. I use TI8 to image all my PCs and on any of them it takes 5-20 MINUTES to image each drive. I store the images on a either another partition on the same physical disk or on a second/slave drive in the same system or on another hard drive on another PC across my LAN. Using any of these methods it only take the time I mentioned above.

NemesisDB · Answer

NTFS is slower than Fat32 but it shouldn't be that much slower.  What's the cluster size when you format to NTFS?

voss · Answer

Thanks for the replies. I am using an Inspiron 8100, which I converted to USB 2.0, using a Syba PC MCIA USB 2.0 card. I have created an exact image of the 80 GB drive on the external drive, but it takes 2-5 hours, depending on the type of file system. Why so slow?

voss · Answer

I have tried two different external drives, and both take 4-5 hours to make an Acronis image of the 80 GB drive on my Inspiron 8100. Any ideas?

Storage, Drives & Media

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