NTFS: A File System with Integrity and Complexity

NTFS is the file system used by Windows. It is a powerful and complicated file system. There are few file systems that provide as many features and to fully cover them all would require a book. And in fact there is a book detailing NTFS, and it's already out of date. The purpose of this article is not to cover all of the features of NTFS, nor will it exhaustively cover NTFS features in detail. Instead we will cover its basic structure and then describe some of its more advanced features and provide use examples where possible. We will focus more on what it does, rather than how it does it. Trying to walk the line between informative and detailed is difficult and so this article contains a lot of references for people who hunger for more detail.

Glossary of NTFS Terms

Sector - A low level unit of storage on a disk. Traditionally 512 bytes, now moving to 4096 bytes
Cluster - A unit of disk space on a file system that consists of multiple sectors
File system - a method of organizing and storing files and data
Partition - A logical division of a hard disk's data that is formatted with and holds the file system
MBR - The master boot record is both a sector and a partition and holds OS boot information
Metadata - Attributes that help describe file data, such as owner, size, creation date, file type, etc.
MFT - The Master File Table is the primary metadata file that defines an NTFS volume or partition
Basic disk - A basic disk or basic volume is a simple storage type used by Windows
Dynamic disk - Dynamic disks are a more advanced storage type used by Windows. Useful when a system has many disks. They offer features that basic disks do not such as spanning, striping, and RAID
GUID partition table (GPT) - The GPT is a new disk architecture that expands on the MBR and allows for very large file systems
Slack - Wasted space due to the cluster size of a file system

Read more: OS News

Posted via email from .NET Info