What is NTFS?

NTFS or New Technology File System is the standard file system of Windows NT and its descendants Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Windows versions 95, 98, 98SE and ME cannot natively read NTFS file system, although third-party utilities do exist for this purpose.

NTFS is the Windows NT file system. Unlike FAT, NTFS does not use an allocation table but stores information about any file directly with the file. Other operating systems, including Windows 95, 98, ME, and many applications, such as ScanDisk, cannot read NTFS partitions. However, NTFS files or folders that are shared on a network can be accessed by other operating systems. Advantages of NTFS over FAT include faster access to files, more efficient information storage (for example, through a smaller cluster size), better data recovery, integrated file compression, larger disk partitions, and better file security. NTFS is preferred for Windows NT Server because of its better security and fault tolerance features. NTFS partitions also remain relatively unfragmented for long periods of time.

NTFS has five versions: v1.0, v1.1 and v1.2 found in NT 3.51 and NT 4, v3.0 found in Windows 2000 and v3.1 found in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. These versions are sometimes referred to as v4.0, v5.0 and v5.1, after the version of Windows they ship with. NTFS has features to improve reliability, such as transaction logs to help recover from disk failures. To control access to files, you can set permissions for directories and/or individual files. Newer versions added extra features: Windows 2000 introduced quotas. For large applications, NTFS supports spanning volumes, which means files and directories can be spread out across several physical disks.

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