Advantages and disadvantages of the disk file system Fat, Fat32, NTFS, and exFAT

When formatting a disk in Windows, you can see options such as FAT, FAT32, and NTFS in the options of the file system, when formatting a USB flash drive or other mobile storage devices, the exFAT option is displayed. What are the four disk formats and their advantages and disadvantages?

When formatting a disk in Windows, you can see options such as "FAT", "FAT32", and "NTFS" in the options of the file system, when formatting a USB flash drive or other mobile storage devices, the "exFAT" option is displayed. what do these four disk formats mean and what are their advantages and disadvantages? What should we choose? The following is a detailed introduction.

Before introducing the differences between the four disk formats, let's take a look at what is a disk file system. A hard disk that has not been formatted can be used as a supermarket store with no goods placed. before placing goods, you must first divide the area by product category and install the shelves. Partitioning and formatting of disks is equivalent to dividing commodity areas and installing shelves in supermarkets.

I. FAT (FAT16) file system

This is the most common hard disk partition format for MS-DOS and the earliest WIN95 operating systems. It uses a 16-bit File Allocation Table and supports hard disk partitions up to 2 GB.

FAT file system advantages: FAT (FAT16) is currently the most widely used and the most widely used disk partition format. almost all operating systems support this format, this partition format is supported from DOS WINDOWS95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP and even LINUX.

Disadvantages of the FAT file system: a maximum of 2 GB partitions are supported, and each partition can have a maximum of 65525 clusters. Therefore, the disk utilization efficiency is very low. In DOS and WINDOWS systems, disk files are distributed in clusters. one cluster is only allocated to one file, regardless of the size of the entire cluster occupied by the file. In this way, even if a file is small, it will occupy a cluster, and all the remaining space will be idle there, resulting in a waste of disk space. Due to the partition table capacity limit, the larger the FAT partition, the larger the capacity of each cluster on the disk, resulting in greater waste.

The FAT file system is basically no longer used except for some special applications. Imagine that the current mainstream hard disk capacity has reached 1 TB (1 TB = 1024 GB), if the FAT format is used, each partition can be up to 2 GB, how many drive letters are there in the computer!

II. FAT32 file system

I believe that we are not familiar with the FAT32 file system. after all, FAT32 has been widely used since Win98. The FAT32 format adopts a 32-bit File Allocation Table, which greatly enhances the disk capacity and breaks through the limit of 2 GB for each partition of FAT16. Windows 95 and later operating systems support the FAT32 format.

Advantages of the FAT32 file system: it breaks through the limit that FAT only has 2 GB of capacity for each partition and can support 2 TB (2048 GB) of partitions. With a partition capacity of no more than 8 GB, the capacity of each cluster is fixed to 4 kB. compared with FAT16, this can greatly reduce disk waste and improve disk utilization.

Disadvantages of the FAT32 file system: disks partitioned in the FAT32 format are slower than disks partitioned in the FAT16 format due to the expansion of the File Allocation Table, the DOS system and some early applications do not support this partition format. Another fatal drawback is that FAT32 is gradually eliminated, which means that a single file of FAT32 can support a maximum of 4 GB. Now we have entered the HD era. the p and p HD video files are likely to exceed 4 GB, so FAT32 is declining.

Note: In windows/xp and later operating systems, when you partition the hard disk with the built-in disk management tool, you can only create a maximum of 32 GB FAT32 file system, which is a windows limitation. Partition using other third-party tools or partitions under DOS or win98 can be split into larger partitions, and can be used normally in windows2000/xp.

III. NTFS file system

NTFS has gradually become the mainstream disk format since Windows XP, it is a series of operating systems supported by Microsoft Windows NT kernel. it is a disk format specially designed for management security features such as network and disk quotas and file encryption. Operating systems that support NTFS disk formats include windows nt, windows xp, WINDOWS vista, and WINDOWS 7. Therefore, NTFS is still the mainstream disk format, and a large number of users are using it.

NTFS file system advantages: NTFS partition has high security and stability, and it is not easy to generate file fragments during use. It records user operations and imposes strict restrictions on user permissions, so that each user can only perform operations according to the permissions granted by the system, fully protecting the security of the system and data. In addition, the most intuitive advantage of NTFS for most users is that the size of a single file exceeds the 4 GB limit of FAT32.

NTFS file system disadvantages: NTFS has many advantages, but these are designed for traditional mechanical hard disks, not necessarily applicable to emerging Flash materials. NTFS partitions use a "log-type" file system. to record detailed read/write operations on disks, flash storage media such as USB flash drives may cause a great burden, for example, if you access a file or directory, the number of reads and writes on the NTFS system is much higher than that on FAT32. Theoretically, the NTFS-format USB flash drive is more vulnerable to damage, partitions smaller than MB also waste more space than FAT16.

IV. exFAT file system

ExFAT is a format that has only appeared in recent years. it mainly targets mobile storage devices, flash memory, and USB flash disks. Because a single file in the FAT32 format cannot exceed 4 GB, it is easy to damage the flash memory chip in the NTFS format. Therefore, the EXFAT format is developed to solve these problems.

ExFAT file system advantages: the maximum partition size and single file size can reach 16 EB (16 × 1024 × 1024 TB); the cluster size is not often flexible, the minimum is KB, the maximum is 32 MB; the remaining space allocation table is used to ensure higher space utilization. The maximum number of files in the same directory can be up to 65536. access control is supported and TFAT is supported ). It can be seen that ExFAT is a file system dedicated to flash memory. only a USB flash disk and a memory card can be formatted as exFAT. traditional hard disks cannot be formatted as exFAT, because exFAT is not more powerful than NTFS, however, it is more suitable for flash memory than NTFS and FAT32.

ExFAT file system disadvantages: as a brand new file system, exFAT has poor compatibility on computers. Currently, mainstream XP and Vista do not support ExFAT by default, XP must be upgraded to the SP3 patch, and Vista must be upgraded to the SP1 patch to support it. Of course, Microsoft also provides exFAT independent update files, which are supported by default by Win7.