Are the Disk Partitions Formatted Using NTFS 5.0?
If your server is new and Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 has been recently installed, then any drives that have been formatted with it have been formatted using NTFS 5.0. But, if the server is older, and previously ran Windows NT 4.0 Server, and the drives have not been reformatted since upgrading to Windows 2000 or 2003, the disks most likely were formatted using NTFS 4.0. While there is not a lot of difference between NTFS 4.0 and 5.0, there is enough to make the upgrade worth your while. NTFS 5.0 includes some new performance enhancements, which mean fewer disk accesses to find files, and generally overall faster disk reads. Before Windows 2000 and 2003, some DBAs formatted the drives or disk arrays dedicated to log files as FAT because it had a small performance benefit over NTFS 4.0. This is no longer true under NTFS 5.0, so all disks for all SQL Server should be formatted using NTFS 5.0 for best performance. If you currently have a production SQL Server that is using NTFS 4.0 forma
