The advantages and disadvantages of the disk file system fat, Fat32, NTFS, exFAT

When we format the disk in the Windows system, the file system options can be seen in the "FAT", "FAT32", "NTFS" and other options, when the USB flash drive or other mobile storage devices will also appear when the "exFAT" option, then the four kinds of disk format is what meaning, What are the pros and cons? Should we choose that? Here is a detailed introduction to you.

Before we introduce the differences between the four disk formats, let's take a look at what a disk file system is. A piece of hard disk that has not been formatted, can be likened to a supermarket without placing goods hypermarket, before placing the goods, always first by the category of goods divided into a good area, and installed shelves it. The partitioning and formatting of the disk is equivalent to dividing the commodity area and installing shelves in the supermarket hypermarket.

One, FAT (FAT16) file system

This is the most common hard disk partition format in MS-DOS and the earliest WIN95 operating system. It uses a 16-bit file allocation table and can support hard disk partitions up to 2GB.

FAT file System benefits: Fat (FAT16) is currently the most widely used and obtains the most operating system of a disk partition format, almost all operating systems support this format, from DOS Windows95/98/nt/me/2000/xp, Even Linux supports this partitioning format.

FAT file system disadvantage: Only 2GB partitions are supported, and each partition can have a maximum of 65,525 clusters. Therefore, the efficiency of disk utilization is very low. Because in DOS and Windows systems, the allocation of disk files is in clusters, and a cluster is allocated to only one file, regardless of how much the file occupies the entire cluster capacity. In this way, even if a file is small, it will occupy a cluster, the remaining space is all idle there, creating a waste of disk space. Due to the limited capacity of the partition table, the larger the FAT partition, the larger the capacity of each cluster on the disk and the greater the waste.

The FAT file system, currently in addition to some special applications, is basically no longer used. Imagine, the current mainstream hard disk capacity has reached 1TB (1TB=1024GB), if the use of fat format, each partition the largest only 2GB, then the computer will have how many disk characters Ah!

ii.. FAT32 File System

I believe that everyone on the FAT32 file system is not too unfamiliar, after all, from the beginning of Win98, FAT32 has been to a wide range of applications. The FAT32 format uses a 32-bit file allocation table, which greatly enhances its ability to disk, breaking the FAT16 limit of 2GB per partition capacity. Operating systems above WIN95 support the FAT32 format.

FAT32 File System Benefits: Breakthrough fat on each partition capacity only 2GB limit, can support large to 2TB (2048G) of the partition. With no more than 8GB of partition capacity, each cluster has a fixed capacity of 4KB, which can significantly reduce disk waste and improve disk utilization compared to FAT16.

FAT32 File System disadvantage: disks partitioned in FAT32 format, because of the expansion of the file allocation table, run slower than the disk in the FAT16 format partition, and the DOS system and some early application software does not support the partition format. There is also a fatal disadvantage to let FAT32 gradually eliminated, this is FAT32 single file maximum support only 4GB. Now in the high-definition era, 720P and 1080P HD video files are easily over 4GB, so FAT32 has gone downhill.

Note: When you partition a hard disk with your own Disk Management tool in WINDOWS2000/XP and later operating systems, you can only create a maximum of 32GB FAT32 file system, which is a Windows restriction. Partitioning with other third-party tools, or DOS or Win98, can be divided into larger partitions and can be used normally in windows2000/xp.

third, NTFS file system

NTFS is an increasingly mainstream disk format from the Windows XP system, supported by the Microsoft Windows NT core family of operating systems, a disk format specifically designed for management security features such as network and disk quotas, file encryption, and so on. The operating systems that support NTFS disk formats are: Windows NT, WINDOWS2000, WINDOWS2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista, WINDOWS7, and so on. Therefore, NTFS is still the mainstream disk format, with a large number of users in use.

NTFS file system benefits: NTFS partitioning has high security and stability and is not easy to produce file fragmentation in use. It can record the operation of the user, through a very strict restrictions on user rights, so that each user can only follow the system-assigned permissions to operate, and fully protect the system and data security. In addition, for most users, the most intuitive advantage of NTFS is that the size of a single file breaks the 4GB limit of FAT32.

NTFS file system disadvantages: Although NTFS has many advantages, these are designed for traditional mechanical hard drives, and not necessarily for emerging flash flash memory materials. NTFS partition is a "journaled" file system, because to record the disk's detailed read and write operations, the flash memory of the USB Flash storage media will be a big burden, such as the same access to a file or directory, on the NTFS system can read and write more than FAT32, In theory, NTFS-formatted USB sticks are more prone to damage, and partitions below 400MB are more wasteful than FAT16.

iv.. exfat File System

exFAT is the format that appears in recent years, mainly for mobile storage devices, what flash memory, u disk and so on. Because a single file in the FAT32 format cannot exceed 4G, using NTFS format and easily damaging the flash memory chip, the EXFAT format is developed to address these issues.

exFAT File System Benefits: Partition size and Single file size up to 16EB (16X1024X1024TB), cluster size is very flexible, The minimum 0.5KB, up to 32MB, the use of the remaining space allocation table, higher space utilization, the maximum number of files in the same directory can be up to 65,536, support access control, support TFAT (WinCE early file system). As can be seen, exFAT is a dedicated flash memory file system, only a USB stick and memory card can be formatted into EXFAT, traditional hard disk can not be formatted into EXFAT format, because exFAT features are not better than NTFS, but more suitable for flash use than NTFS and FAT32.

exFAT file System disadvantage: exFAT as a new file system, the compatibility on the computer is not very good, the current mainstream XP and Vista default does not support EXFAT,XP need to upgrade to SP3 patch, Vista needs to upgrade to SP1 patch to support it. Of course Microsoft also provided a separate update file for exFAT, Win7 default support.

The advantages and disadvantages of the disk file system fat, Fat32, NTFS, exFAT (RPM)