Have you ever confused while Windows XP setup installation on a new system or old system with the choices provided to format the disk to NTFS or Fat 32 file system… Then may be you need some basic knowledge about both the files systems. If you are little bit familiar with windows environment of its operating systems from its oldy days say at the time of windows 95 or earlier then may be you have heard of Fat16 (File allocation table) at that time there were hard-disk available only with low storage capacity with small processing power of many CPUs but now everything have changed as there are Huge Hard disk capacity, more powerful processing units and everything that has been changed a lot.

At the old days when fat 16 was developed (in 1981) it was only designed to handle floppy-disk and its extension fat32 was introduced with windows 98 was the first fully developed file system designed handle Large Capacity Hard-disk available at that time. Now with Windows XP one more file system was added as NTFS and still it provides us a chance as which File System we would like to use depends upon what are our needs.

The NTFS file system, introduced first with Windows NT, is a completely different file system from FAT. It provides an increased security, file–by–file compression, quotas, and even encryption. It is the default file system for new installations of Windows XP, and if you’re doing an upgrade from a previous version of Windows, you’ll be asked if you want to convert your existing file systems to NTFS. Don’t worry. If you’ve already upgraded to Windows XP and didn’t do the conversion then, it’s not a problem. You can convert FAT16 or FAT32 volumes to NTFS at any point. Just remember that you can’t easily go back to FAT or FAT32 (without reformatting the drive or partition), not that I think you’ll want to.

But the question is “Is there still any requirement of using Fat file system?”

If you have multiple operating system say Windows 98 and windows Xp then of-course you need to use fat file system as or even if you have a case to install  your drive where you don’t know which operating there will be then i would recommend it will be better to have Fat file system as windows 98 can only read files from fat file systems.