NTFS
The New Technology File System or NTFS was developed for Windows NT, and it was a default file system for all the members of the Windows NT family of operating systems right up until Windows XP which kind of combined NT and the framework of the traditional windows together. On Windows XP and the NTFS became the default for Windows including Windows 10 which you may well be using today. The file sizes in NTFS are measured in ExaBytes(EB).
Advantages:
- It has features like file compression, file permission, and file encryption. These are all built-in at a file system level.
- NTFS is a journaling file system, meaning there are two types of data that are stored when you actually write some data to a disk. There’s the actual file content, and metadata about the file like the file name, its permissions, its location on the disk, etc. So any operations performed on the data like deletion or renaming or relocating file doesn’t affect the data itself but just changes the metadata. A journal stores the intention of the file system before it starts its operations. This ultimately reduces system corruption due to unexpected restarts.
- No restrictions on the size of partitions
Limitations:
- The biggest issue with the NTFS is compatibility with other systems. NTFS is petty much a Windows thing. But some cleanroom implementations for Linux and macOS not written by Microsoft are also available over the internet to overcome this restriction.
- It is relatively slow compared to its contemporaries.
- It has a small disk size.
- The macOS and most Linux distributions have Read-only support by default.
Difference Between FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS File System
When you write data to a storage medium whether it’s a hard drive or an SSD or an SD card or a micro SD card or a USB flash drive you need to write the data in such a way that it can be found again. You can’t just write it randomly on a drive and then expect to get it back one day when you need it. It needs to be organized and that organization is called a file system.
A File System is a collection of rules and algorithms that is responsible for translating logical file operations to the physical storage of information. In simpler words, we can say that the file system controls the flow of storage and retrieval of data in a device.
There are 3 types of the file system in a device:
- FAT32
- exFAT
- NTFS
As mentioned earlier when you store a file on a disk, the operating system needs to know where the file is physically located. It needs to have a way to associate a file name with that file’s contents. In addition to that, there might be other things like folders and file permissions, etc. In this article, we will look into the key difference between them.