plus Fat 32/16 can have file allocation errors(i used to get them and had a friend fix them cuzz back then i knew little about pc's) and be hard to fix it,with NTFS because it is not based on fat32/16, you will not encounter those same errors,what prathapml said is true about fragments, even if an NTFS drive is like 75% fragmented it will still operate quite well,if fat32/16 were fragmented at 75% then performance would drop dramaticaly and you could face random errors on a fat32/16 system.if you tweak the NTFS file system then it could perform quite well even if it is very fragmented. jaclaz:i started from win 3.0 and went on to win95 then 98 then i tried me for a week but hated it cuzz it did weird things to me then i went to w2k pro then xp pro.