6.5. NTFS

The NT file system was designed to be the file system of choice for Windows NT. Since its introduction, several feature enhancements have been made, but the underlying robust design has remained the same. FAT and HPFS (High-Performance File System), the existing file systems from Microsoft when NTFS was designed, were inadequate to meet NT needs. In particular,

  • FAT does not offer the needed amount of file or object security.

  • FAT does not have the features needed to handle the extremely large disks available today. (Recall that FAT originally was designed to handle 1MB disks.)

  • Neither FAT nor HPFS offers transactional features needed to offer reliability and recovery from a system crash.

NTFS offers various features, summarized here and ...

Get Inside Windows Storage: Server Storage Technologies for Windows® 2000, Windows® Server 2003, and Beyond now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.