Linux and Windows partition formats

There are three common partition formats for Windows: fat16, FAT32, and NTFS.
In Linux, there are four formats: ext2, ext3, Linux swap, and vfat.

Fat16:
As a file name, fat (File Allocation Table, File Allocation Table) has become a computer term since its publication in 1981. For reasons of the times, most operating systems, including windows, MacOS, and a variety of UNIX versions, support fat.
This is the disk partition format used in the MS-DOS and earlier Windows 95 operating systems. It uses a 16-bit File Allocation Table, which is currently the most supported disk partition format by the operating system. Almost all operating systems support this partition format, from dos, Windows 95, Windows osr2 to Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, fat16 is supported, however, supporting only 2 GB hard disk partitions has become a major disadvantage. Another disadvantage of the fat16 partition format is that the disk utilization efficiency is low (because in DOS and Windows systems, disk files are distributed in clusters, A cluster is only allocated to one file, regardless of the size of the entire cluster occupied by the file. The size of each cluster is determined by the size of the hard disk partition. The larger the partition, the larger the cluster. For example, if a 1 GB hard disk is divided into only one partition, the cluster size is 32 KB. That is to say, even if a file is only 1 byte long, it will occupy 32 KB of hard disk space during storage, the remaining space is all idle, which leads to a great waste of disk space. The larger the partitions supported by fat16, the larger the capacity of each cluster on the disk, resulting in greater waste. So with the current mainstream hard drive capacity growing, this disadvantage is becoming more and more prominent ). To solve this problem, Microsoft
95 osr2 introduces a new disk partition format-FAT32.

FAT32:
This format uses a 32-bit File Allocation Table, which greatly enhances the disk management capability and breaks through the limit of 2 GB for each partition in fat16. Due to the current reduction in hard disk production costs, the capacity is getting bigger and bigger. After using the FAT32 partition format, we can define a large-capacity hard disk as a partition instead of Several partitions, this greatly facilitates disk management. In addition, compared with fat16, FAT32 can greatly reduce disk waste. It is characterized by the use of small clusters (each cluster is only 4 kb) to allocate file units, greatly improving disk space utilization, reduces waste. The maximum capacity of a single hard disk reaches 2 TB to improve disk utilization. Currently, Windows 95 osr2 and later operating systems support this partition format. However, this partition format also has its disadvantages. The first is a disk partitioned in the FAT32 format. As the File Allocation Table expands, the running speed is slower than that of a disk partitioned in the fat16 format. In addition, due to DOS and Windows
95 does not support this partition format, so after using this partition format, you will no longer be able to use DOS and Windows 95 systems.

NTFS:
To make up for the functional defects of fat, Microsoft has created a file system technology called NTFS. It has excellent security and stability, and is not easy to generate file fragments during use. In addition, it can record user operations and impose 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. Windows 2000, Windows NT, and Windows XP all support this partition format.

Ext2:
Ext2 is a standard file system in GNU/Linux systems. This is the most widely used File System in Linux. It is specially designed for Linux and has extremely fast speed and extremely small CPU usage. Ext2 can be used for both standard block devices (such as hard disks) and Mobile storage devices such as floppy disks.

Ext3:
Ext3 is the next generation of ext2, that is, the log function is added under the ext2 format. Ext3 is a log file system. It records the write operations of the entire disk in a certain area of the disk, in order to trace back when necessary. When a process is interrupted, the system can directly trace and refresh the interrupted part based on these records, and the refresh speed is quite fast. This partition format is widely used in Linux.

Linux swap:
It is a swap file system used for partition swap in Linux. Linux uses this entire partition as the swap space. Generally, the swap partition in this swap format is twice the primary memory. When the memory is insufficient, Linux will write part of the data to the swap partition.

Vfat:
Vfat is called a long file name system. It is a Linux file system compatible with Windows systems. It supports long file names and can be used as partitions for switching files between Windows and Linux systems.