Most people will be surprised that many videocapture card and firewire mfg. recommend you use the Fat16b format for the sole reason of speed. The trade off going to Fat32 is larger partitions (fat16b has 4GB partitions a real hassle on large drives). Also, if you have partition magic change your cluster size to larger numbers. There is a trade off between speed and the useable size of your hard disk but often you can but a good speed increase with a little excess disk space. If you normally access a lot of large files then the trade off becomes less of an issue. A lot of us fall into this category because models and textures tend to be large compared to word processing docs.