Do you think I was born yesterday? I've been dealing with NTFS since you were in school! Simple common sense tells you that NTFS is GUARANTEED slower because of the security and journaling overhead *in most real world situations*, assuming the same level of fragmentation and similar disk layout (cluster size etc). Unless the disk is badly fragmented, FAT32 results in less head motion (you can see this with your own eyes). NTFS has an advantage in speed of directory listings because of the MFT - thus if many, many tiny files are stored in a complex directory structure, with at least some of those directories having hundreds and hundreds of entries, there can be a significant performance increase. But who has a disk setup like that? For an applications-oriented disk, this *single* speed advantage of NTFS is moot. The only case I can think of where this might be significant is say a browser cache that is enormous on a machine with a high-speed network link.

For very large files, the actual file system is almost irrelevant and the main issues are cluster size and fragmentation.