I have a 500GB Iomega USB Drive with about 60GB of files.

It is formatted in FAT32.  Have heard that NTFS gives better
performance, so I am considering using the DOS command
convert to switch.

Question 1) if I do so, will I lose the files?
             2) is it worth it?

No, you won't lose data assuming no problems are encountered.

Windows 2000 includes the convert.exe utility that allows you to convert to
NTFS without any loss of data. The downside to this is you'll end up with
512 byte clusters which is pretty inefficient, slow, and more prone to
fragmentation. The overhead of traversing a greater number of clusters to
retrieve and commit data will result in a degradation in file system (or
disk I/O) performance. From a command prompt;
chkdsk
to see the cluster size.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/214579/EN-US/


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As a previous poster pointed out, the cluster size will shrink to 512 bytes.
Any performance gain from the NTFS file system will be most undoubtedly lost
sue the very small slusters; I'd leave it alone.

Norm Cook wrote:
Regarding the 512 byte clusters read here:
http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.php

John

Thanks to all -- think I'll just leave it be.

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