File System for External Hard Drive

Use both. You are allowed up to four primary partitions and many logical partitions per drive.

FAT 32 is limited to 2 gig. Have one or more of these then NTFS.

Throw in a few Linux partitions while you're at it.

After partitioning, format them.

FAT 16 partitions are limited to 2GB; FAT 32 partitions can be up to 2 terabytes in size.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/154997

I´m sorry, but fat 32 may use only 2 exp 32 -1bits, that means much less then expected, maximum 4 GB -1!

I think:

FAT32
In order to overcome size limit of FAT16, while at the same time allowing DOS real mode code to handle the format, and without reducing available conventional memory unnecessarily, Microsoft implemented a next generation, known as FAT32. Cluster values are represented by 32-bit numbers, of which 28 bits are used to hold the cluster number, for a maximum of approximately 268 million (228) clusters. This allows for drive sizes of up to 8 TiB with 32 KiB clusters, but the boot sector uses a 32-bit field for the sector count, limiting volume size to 2 TiB on a hard disk with 512 byte sectors.

Ref: WikPedia

The native file system for Windows XP is NTFS. It stands for "New Technology File System" -- which only means it is new relative to FAT 32, which was developed for DOS (really old). Windows XP was built on the third generation of NTFS. So if you are concerned about speed, format in NTFS. And do it in one single partition. The only reason to use other formats is if you will be accessing the drive from different systems using those formats.

Yours was the first really good post when reading down from the top, therefore a GA from me...

Regards.

A good answer!

I remember in the time of Fat16 and largest HD was just 1.2 G or so in single partition sector size was 64K & files in windows directory well above 2000 & a very critical size of 500 [it is not exact 500] was the most economical size of partition to get the size of sector of 4K.

Just a memory of old days when some partitons were no accessed by som version of DOS

It was a time of deep understanding of FAT, DOS, Syntex & ...

All of this misses the point: which is how you will use the disk. Typically, external drives are preformated in FAT32 which makes them more (shall we say) transportable between various computers... and re-configurable with less problem and risk. However, if the HDD will be connected only with your present NTFA HDD, and it's speed you seek, (and you do not want file size limitations) you will definitely not want FAT 32. But remember that NTFS can't go back to FAT32 once formatted...that is, without reformatting and wiping the disk clean. FAT32 on the other hand, for its inferior relative performance, does not have that limitation.