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What is nTFS?

Can I have a complete thorough explanation of what the different in NTFS and FAT File Systems are?

  • I am guessing that NTFS is disk whereas FAT is hardstate. Am I correct? Another guess I had was, NTFS is the file system of the hard drives that are mounted into your computer, whereas FAT is USB external hard drives. What got me wondering about this was, when I ran system defrag, it showed my C:\ and D:\ drives as NTFS, which are disk drives, and showed my showed my external USB Flashdrive as FAT. What would it tell me my 60GB external disk drives would be?

  • Answer:

    Not exactly. NTFS and FAT are different ways of organising the information on disks, yes, but hard drives can be formatted as FAT if you want. Conversely, you can format flash drives as NTFS; Google it. However, FAT32 partitions can only be 4GB in size, so it is not normally used for hard drives, especially because NTFS is designed better so is faster to draw information from. Your external drive will probably be NTFS. Other examples of file systems are ext3, ext4 and zfs. These tend to be used by Linux systems, and, being newer than NTFS, are probably better. Here is an old Microsoft article explaining NTFS vs FAT http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/russel_october01.mspx

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FAT and NTFS are both file allocation tables. This is what Windows uses to store data. Each version uses a different size of blocks to store data. When you save a file, Windows looks at which blocks are used and where they are located on the drive. If the file is smaller then the size that the table uses then the file is stored in one block and nothing else can be written to it as long as that file is there. Each version of FAT and NTFS allows for smaller and smaller blocks of data to be used. Also, each version improved upon what attributes that can be attached to files. These include read-only,hidden,system, and with the NTFS there are the encrypted and such that were implemented starting with Windows 2000. That is the simple way of explaining it to you. IF you need more, just use the Wiki page in the links below.

NOPE, nope, nope. Basically, NTFS stands for New Technology File System, whilst FAT32 stands for File Allocation Table (32 bit). NTFS is newer, and better (there are some severe limtations in the scope of FAT). FAT is used on USB sticks because only windows understands NTFS, and USB drives can be used on windows, mac and linux. Your 60GB will most likely be NTFS.

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