Will FAT32 slow down seek time on MAC ?

[fab5freddy]

Will a FAT32 formatted external HD slow down seek time on MAC ?
as opposed to a MAC journaled disk ?

i have a maxtor 500 GB external HD, and the seek times seem very slow,
it is FAT32 formatted......

 

[unity]

Heck ya.

I am not sure why, and there is a reason maybe some one can explain, but EVERY OS release from Apple, from System 7 to 9 and X, has had slow access times with FAT file systems.

I have a USB stick, its only 128MB, since I use it to transfer stuff to PCs I have it formated for such. The read/write times are horrible.

My somewhat clueless friend purchased an external USB drive. It came formated as FAT and he did not know to re-format it. I noticed that transfering data from the drive was VERY slow. I then looked an found out it was FAT formated. We finished the transfer, erased the drive and things speed up a lot!

So both read and write seem to be slow. So I can only imagine that Spotlight may slow a bit, but then again I would think this would happen more so during indexing. Once indexed (which is stored on the drive itself) I would think it would be faster but I am not sure how the index is setup.

 

[Matek]

I have a USB stick, its only 128MB, since I use it to transfer stuff to PCs I have it formated for such. The read/write times are horrible.

My somewhat clueless friend purchased an external USB drive. It came formated as FAT and he did not know to re-format it. I noticed that transfering data from the drive was VERY slow. I then looked an found out it was FAT formated. We finished the transfer, erased the drive and things speed up a lot!

I think he's asking about seek times, not transfer rates, that's an entirely different thing.

 

[unity]

I think he's asking about seek times, not transfer rates, that's an entirely different thing.

How about READING my entire post I did talk about seek times - and my understanding is that the index is stored on the drive itself. So guess what, the index must be accessed. Accessing something on the drive is transferring data, same thing.