FAT is a computer file system architecture now widely used on most computer systems and most memory cards,NTFS is the standard file system of Windows NT.

FAT and NTFS possibly artificial or natural damaged,in this case,do you think we just need reformat hard drive?If you have no data to recover,then you can reformat hard drive.But I think no body never have important data or files on the computer system,for recover data,must to restore ntfs/fat drive.

File Allocation Table or FAT is a computer file system architecture now widely used on most computer systems and most memory cards, such as those used with digital cameras.The FAT file system is relatively straightforward technically and is supported by virtually all existing operating systems for personal computers.What the people are commonly used is fat16 and fat32.
Compaq DOS 3.31 (an OEM version of MS-DOS 3.3 released by Compaq with their machines) introduced what is today called the FAT16 format, with the expansion of the 16-bit disk sector count to 32 bits.In order to overcome the volume size limit of FAT16, while still allowing DOS real mode code to handle the format without unnecessarily reducing the available conventional memory, Microsoft implemented a newer generation of FAT, known as FAT32, with cluster values held in a 32-bit field, of which 28 bits are used to hold the cluster number, for a maximum of approximately 268 million (228) clusters.
NTFS is the standard file system of Windows NT, including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.NTFS supersedes the FAT file system as the preferred file system for Microsoft’s Windows operating systems. NTFS has several improvements over FAT and HPFS (High Performance File System) such as improved support for metadata and the use of advanced data structures to improve performance, reliability, and disk space utilization, plus additional extensions such as security access control lists (ACL) and file system journaling.NTFS compresses files using a variant of the LZ77 algorithm.The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) keeps historical versions of files and folders on NTFS volumes by copying old, newly-overwritten data to shadow copy (copy-on-write).While the different NTFS versions are for the most part fully forward- and backward-compatible, there are technical considerations for mounting newer NTFS volumes in older versions of Microsoft Windows. This affects dual-booting, and external portable hard drives.
File Allocation Table or FAT is a computer file system architecture now widely used on most computer systems and most memory cards, such as those used with digital cameras.

FAT is easier damaged than NTFS.So maybe there are more times to restore FAT drive.

Encrypting File System(EFS) provides strong and user-transparent encryption of any file or folder on an NTFS volume.
Reparse points was introduced in NTFS v3. These are used by associating a reparse tag in the user space attribute of a file or directory.
Disk quotas were introduced in NTFS v3. They allow the administrator of a computer that runs a version of Windows that supports NTFS to set a threshold of disk space that users may use.