acer drive formats?

I'm in the process of picking up a notebook this week. I've been looking at the ferrari 3200, travelmate 8003 and the aspire 2025.

From all the online reviews I've seen, the biggest problems have been with the slower and FAT 32 formatted drive on the ferrari. Does anyone know if all the acer notebooks that I have mentioned have the same drives? And if so. Is there anyway at all to reformat the drive to NTFS or is it gonna be an upgrade?


thanks.

 

Yep! When you first get your notebook, you can use the installation disk to re-format your drive. It will ask you how you want to partition your drive, and in which file system you want to format the computer. For some reason, Acer partitions the drive in two. Anyway, I just re-partitioned it into one, but left it as FAT. All data will be lost, and the operating system will have to re-installed, but takes less than half an hour. But since you are doing when you get it brand new, you won't have any data to lose anyway!

Honestly though, does it make that much of difference if it is FAT or NTFS? I don't me in theory, but actually in practice, will you actually notice a speed difference?

 

You should be able to use the built-in utility that comes with XP to convert your FAT system to NTFS. It's a 1 way conversion, you can't convert back to FAT32 without formatting the system. This will elimiated the reload process and you keep all your files/settings.

-Vb-

 

I noticed on the Acer 2025 an issue. I believe that they left it fat 32 for a reason. After i converted it over to NTFS the arcade function prior to bootup no longer works. I haven't really had the time to research it yet but perhaps the fat32 is done that way so the aspire arcade feature can load? I'll have to read up on the owners manual this weekend.

Oh... and the advantages of NTFS is smaller file clusters and security. Smaller file clusters will actually end up saving you space. If something is taking up 50 gigs of hd space on Fat 32 it should take up a small percentage less on NTFS. Maybe even a gig or more. I'd don't know the exact math but it works out in the long run.

You can also enable compression on NTFS to save even more space but I wouldn't do that on the Acer HD's unless you upgrade to a 7200rpm drive. The access times are low as it is and you don't want the compression to slow down the drive even more.

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by Venombite

 

FAT32 is faster if your partitions are smaller on your hard drive and NTFS is going to run faster as your hard drive partitions get larger. Considering the speed of the hard drive as it is, your increase in speed is probably not going to make much of a difference. If you really want the hard drive to run faster, just buy a faster one. Unless you're worried about security, I wouldn't bother trying to upgrade to NTFS.

~Jiff

~Jiff

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by PoKid
Oh... and the advantages of NTFS is smaller file clusters and security. Smaller file clusters will actually end up saving you space. If something is taking up 50 gigs of hd space on Fat 32 it should take up a small percentage less on NTFS. Maybe even a gig or more. I'd don't know the exact math but it works out in the long run.
<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'></font id='quote'></blockquote id='quote'>

Upgrading to NFTS will increase space if you drop the cluster size down to 512bytes or any size smaller than Fat32's 32K size. The reason you save space because having a file 1K in size will only use 1K approx (2x512byte clusters), but on Fat32, a 1K file will utilize 32K (1x32K cluster). The main problem by switching to NTFS, is that fact that the system will run slower. This happens because the system now must search through an increased amount of clusters. I noticed this performance difference when I had a 60GB HDD 4200rpm running WinXP Pro on NTFS 512bytes/cluster. As soon as I reloaded the OS and converted everything to Fat32, it ran MUCH faster. All the HP drivers/software reloaded just like stock.

-Vb-

 

I converted my drive (both partitions) by following the directions here- very painless and no data loss -

http://aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.htm[^]

Acer Aspire 1662 WLMi
P4 3.0 Ghz
ATI 9700 Mobility o/c to 436/246
10,372 3d2001SE Marks

 

I think a big reason many people convert to NTFS is for security reasons. If I'm not mistaken, it's virtually impossible to protect your data on FAT32.

 

I had no problems converting to NTFS - I just followed the instructions (above) to a tee- no data loss at all.

Acer Aspire 1662 WLMi
P4 3.0 Ghz
ATI 9700 Mobility o/c to 436/246
10,372 3d2001SE Marks

 

the arcade function uses its own tiny partition, perhaps linux based iirc, so repartitioning the drive might have destroyed this.

Did you remove this, usually hidden partition on your Aspire 2025?

The 8000s also come with FAT32 formatted drives, as does the 3200 if I've heard the correct story.

 

The Acer apps are all gone from my 1662WMLi - I don't know if the reformatting of the partitions did it or the installation of Windows XP SP-2.

I'm going to reinstall them from the CDs - really just curios what they do.....

Acer Aspire 1662 WLMi
P4 3.0 Ghz
ATI 9700 Mobility o/c to 436/246
10,372 3d2001SE Marks

 

If you reformatted the HDD and re-installed XP without using the Acer supplied Restore CD's, that would explain it. The Acer apps are all included on their CD's.

-Vb-