What File System Should You Be Using?

In the old days of DOS and Windows 3.1, this was an irrelevant question. You had your choice of FAT16, FAT16, FAT16, FAT16 or FAT16. Unless, of course you were formatting a floppy disk. Then you used FAT12. Windows 95 OSR2 and subsequent WIN9x OSs added  FAT32. Windows NT 4.0, 2000 and XP offer NTFS. And to further confound the issue, With Windows 2000 and later, there are two versions of NTFS

The biggest differences between FAT16 and FAT32 is the ability to use Long File Names, and the way partitions are managed by the OS. Without going into too much detail, FAT16 allowed up to 2GB partitions and file names with 8 characters for the file name, plus three more for an extension. FAT32 allows much larger partitions and file names up to 255 characters. It also uses disk space more efficiently. When partitioned to 2GB, a file allocation unit was 32K. With FAT32, it is only 8K. What that means is that a very small file, such as a Windows icon that is only a few hundred bytes, occupies 32K of drive space in FAT16. 800 bytes holds the file and the other 31,200 are wasted space. FAT16 wastes far less space on small files.

NTFS shares may attributes of FAT32, including Long File Names, partitions sizing and disk usage. But it also adds other features, such as the ability to add file system security to individual files and folders. NTFS 5.0 goes a couple of steps further and add user quotas, encryption and selective compression of files and folders.

 

Want to know more about file systems?

Click Here

PC Hardware Maintenance and Repair has them all!