NTFS

NTFS

(New Technology File System) The primary Windows file system, starting with Windows NT. NTFS is required to implement various security and administrative features in Windows. For example, NTFS supports Active Directory domain names and provides file encryption. Permissions can be set at the file level rather than by folder, and individual users can be assigned disk space quotas.

NTFS is a journaling file system that can recover from disk errors more readily than the earlier FAT32 file system. It also supports the Unicode character set and long file names (up to 255 characters). See journaling file system.

FAT32 for External Drives
On Windows NTFS systems, external hard drives and USB drives are often formatted in FAT32 for greater compatibility with other computers. See MFT, FAT32 and file system.

         FAT16  FAT32   NTFS

 Max     4GB    32GB    16TB+
 Volume        (2K/XP)
 Size

 Max
 File    2GB    4GB     16TB
 Size

 OS      DOS
         OS/2
         Win3x
         Win95  Win95/OSR2
         Win98  Win98
         WinNT  WinNT   WinNT(SP4)
         Win2K  Win2K   Win2K
         WinXP  WinXP   WinXP
                        WinVista
                        Win7

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NTFS - NT File System