NTFS : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

2007-08-26 by Roedy Green ©1997-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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NTFS

New Technology File System. A way of storing data on a disk partition, an advancement over the older FAT scheme.

Advantages

Increased reliability. Less likely to lose information in a crash.
More efficient storage of small files.
Option of compressing files and directories.
Faster access to large random access files (e.g. databases)
NTFS is only available with NT/W2K/XP/W2K3/Vista.

Disadvantages

The main reason not to use NTFS is if you want to share data with some OS such as DOS that does not support it. In that case you might use a small FAT partition for exchange and make your main partitions NTFS.
NTFS has more overhead so is slightly slower, at least for small partitions.
You can convert FAT to NTFS with CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS at the command line, but you can’t convert back.

The essay on the defragger explains some of the various system files used by NTFS You can use the fsutil utility to tweak various features of the way NTFS works.

ChkDsk
defragger
FAT
fsutil

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