Deciding on what type of File System to use with your PC - By: Cole Rees

If you are a computer user if you are looking to upgrade your PC or replace the hard drives you will most likely have to start with a fresh install of your operating system. The good news is that there are a few ways that you can optimize your file system or hard drive setup.

The hard drive setup that you use can be improved by utilizing the raid setup, basically a raid setup is by combining two or more hard drives together for either improved performance or increased reliability. With a raid setup you also combine the hard drives together for increased capacity for example if you have two 160 GB hard drives in total you would have 320 GB on one raid setup. There are many different levels of raid that you can choose from, but you must decide if you want performance or reliability.

If you are mostly concerned with your PC performance then you will most likely go with the Raid 0 or Raid 5 levels but you will find that Raid 5 is much better because it will offer you increased speeds and also disk redundancy in the case of a drive failure you will not lose valuable information. Another option is the Raid 10 which is quite common among businesses but it will cost you quite a bit more money due to the amount of disks you have to use. The Raid 10 is the best option for a business that wants to protect its information in the case of hardware failure, although it’s also recommended to use another form of data backup along with this raid level.

Another important aspect of setting up your PC when installing the operating system is deciding on the type of file system you will want to use, there are two major choices here these would be either FAT32 or NTFS. You will almost always want to choose a NTFS file system although if you are running on older operating systems you may be limited to using FAT32. There are a few benefits to using an NTFS file system these include, support of data compression, less susceptible to disk errors and the ability to log errors which can be fixed more easily. The only benefit of FAT file system is if you have multiple hard disks running on different operating systems such as doing a dual booting your computer and choosing which operating system you want to use. Although you will have to keep in mind with a FAT system there is no data security for your files.

About the Author

Make sure you make the most of your storage in your computers, expand with the help of external hard drives to enable you to store more files and back them up regularly

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