Actually, not here to hinder at all (no, really, I'm not...) BTW, NTFS itself was initially put together as a way to add UNIX-like permissions and security (to compare with *ix' chmod and chown ), and to get the early stages of POSIX compliancy. Dunno all the specifics about how XP handles FAT32 (the poster never specified which OS version he/she had), but I do know that: 1) NTFS demands more overhead than FAT32 (and damned near anything else). In a 40GB hard drive, you can expect NTFS to eat 4.something GB, FAT32 to eat two and a half GB. Ever wondered why you could never format an NTFS floppy? 2) FAT32 is faster, mostly because it doesn't have to perform permissions checks and ownership checks each time a file is accessed. (shrug) - not arguing at all, and the choice for the poster is a Windows one no matter which way he/she goes... no skin off my butt in either direction. /P