backup to external hard drive

Good morning everyone!

I just bought a 160 GB external HDD for backups on my WXP Home machine ( the
HDD is connected using USB 2.0). I have read in previous posts that I must
change the file system on the new drive from FAT32 to NFTS to overcome the 4
GB barrier imposed by FAT32. I have a couple of questions regarding this....

1 - Is there an alternative to doing this? I have an old W98SE machine that
I would like to back up on this HDD as well. Win98 will not recognize an NFTS
drive, will it?
2 -Is it better to just copy essential files onto the backup HDD using
Windows explorer, or perform a complete C drive backup using the backup
utility?
3 - Is it better to have one HUGE 40 GB backup file(on an NFTS drive), or a
backup that is split into 10 - 4 GB files( on a FAT 32 drive?) Would I need
to purchase software to split the backup into 4GB files? Which software is
best?
4 - If I decide to change to NFTS, then can I just reformat the new external
HDD to make it an NFTS drive? What allocation unit size should I use (there
are several choices ranging from "default" to 4096 bytes) I know that if I
reformat the drive, I will lose all data on it... not a problem.
5 -Are there any programs out there that backup faster than the backup
utility that is packaged with WinXP Home? I tried backing up my C drive last
night and the data transfer rate was about 120 MB/min (which would translate
into about 6 hours to back up 40 GB)

Thanks,
Ian