HFS or FAT32 - which is quicker?

Which is the quicker format? I'm about to format a Hard Drive but I'm reluctant to go FAT32 as its sooooo old. Anyone know if HFS is comparable to NTFS?

On the Mac HFS (or more precisely, HFS+) is quicker than FAT32. Disk accesses are a lot faster, and FAT32 doesn't have Journaling.
As FAT32 is a Windows filesystem anyway, the only reason to use it with a Mac would be on an external drive, which needs to be accessible by both platforms.
Because HFS is not recognised by Windows, and MacOS (and every other OS which is not Win2k/XP) can only read NTFS, but not write.

When will MACs be able to write NTFS?

NTFS is Microsoft-proprietary file system, and MS is not giving any info to developper of other systems on how to access it.
Just like HFS can be read from Linux, but, AFAIK, can not be written too...(that might have changed though)

Windows is not even able to read HFS. Another thing is that MacOS is able to format a disk in FAT32, the size being only limited of the FAT32 structure (which I believe is 128GB, but am not sure).
Windows 2k/XP are not able to do this, their limit lies somewhere around 40GB. Win98 can handle and format a full size FAT32 HD...unlike it's "more evolved" successors Win2k/XP...

So if you want to use a large disk in FAT32, you need to format it from Windows 98....or from MacOS X.

So much about Windows' "backwards compatibility"...

Avalon said:

On the Mac HFS (or more precisely, HFS+) is quicker than FAT32. Disk accesses are a lot faster, and FAT32 doesn't have Journaling.

Click to expand...

Sorry but what is journaling?

means that the operating system keeps a continuous log (journal) of the changes made to the files on the volume. This helps the operating system restore the volume to a usable state when a power failure or other problem interrupts the disk's operation and damages files.