How does NTFS compared to FAT32 in Windows XP, and which is faster?
NTFS has much more built-in features than FAT, so generally it is a bit slower.
However it depends on many factors such as cluster size, average file size, etc.
For example, NTFS can keep small files inside MFT entry, so if the file size is less than cluster size, most likely it will be accessed much faster on NTFS than on FAT.
Generally speaking the performance of NTFS on large volumes is higher than performance of FAT32. NTFS performance on small volumes is lower than performance of FAT/FAT32.