Basic knowledge about Ntfs and Fat32 disk formats

Disk format problems

1. What is NTFS?

To learn about NTFS, we should first understand FAT. FAT (File Allocation Table) is the idea of "File Allocation Table. For us, its significance lies in the management of hard disk partitions. FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS are currently the most common file systems.

FAT16: the previously used DOS and Windows 95 all use FAT16 file systems. Currently, common Windows 98/2000/XP and other systems support FAT16 file systems. It can manage up to 2 GB of partitions, but each partition can have up to 65525 clusters (the cluster is the disk space configuration unit ). As the disk or partition capacity increases, the space occupied by each cluster will become larger and larger, leading to a waste of hard disk space.

FAT32: with the emergence of large-capacity hard disks, FAT32 has become popular since Windows 98. It is an enhanced version of FAT16 and supports partitions up to 2 TB (2048 GB. FAT32 clusters are smaller than FAT16, which effectively saves hard disk space.

NTFS: A series of operating systems supported by Microsoft Windows NT kernel, a disk format specially designed for management security features such as network and disk quotas and file encryption. With the popularity of Windows 2000/XP with NT as the kernel, many individual users began to use NTFS. NTFS also stores data files in units of clusters, but the size of the NTFS clusters does not depend on the size of disks or partitions. The reduction of the cluster size not only reduces the waste of disk space, but also reduces the possibility of generating disk fragments. NTFS supports file encryption management to provide users with high-level security assurance.

2. What systems can support the NTFS file system?

Only Windows NT/2000/XP can recognize NTFS systems. Windows 9x/Me, DOS, and other operating systems cannot support or recognize NTFS-format disks. Because the DOS system does not support the NTFS system, it is best not to make the C: disk as the NTFS system, so that it is easy to fix it in the DOS system after the system crashes.

NTFS and operating system support table

File System Supported Operating Systems

FAT16 windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP Unix, Linux, DOS

FAT32 windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP

NTFS windows nt/2000/XP