What is NTFS?

NTFS, short for NT File System, is the most secure and robust file system for Windows 7, Vista, XP, and 2000. It provides security by supporting access control and ownership privileges, meaning you can set permission for groups or individual users to access certain files.

NTFS 5.0 was released with Windows 2000, and is also used in Windows XP and Vista. NTFS 5.0 provides some additional capabilities which were not included in NTFS 4.0, which was used in Windows NT. Both versions of NTFS share the following features:

• NTFS supports compression of individual files and folders which can be read and written to while they are compressed.
  
  
• NTFS is a recoverable file system, meaning it has the ability to undo or redo operations that failed due to such problems as system failure or power loss.

In addition to the above features, NTFS 5.0 also provides the following functionality:

• Disk quotas: Administrators can limit the amount of disk space users can consume on a per-volume basis. The three quota levels are: Off, Tracking, and Enforced.
  
  
• Encryption: The NTFS 5.0 file system can automatically encrypt and decrypt file data as it is read and written to the disk.
  
  
• Reparse points: Programs can trap open operations against objects in the file system and run their own code before returning file data. This feature can be used to extend file system features such as mount points, which you can use to redirect data read and written from a folder to another volume or physical disk.
  
  
• Sparse files: Allows programs to create very large files, but to consume disk space only as needed.
  
  
• USN Journal: Provides a persistent log of all changes made to files on the volume. This feature is one of the reasons that the Windows 2000 domain controller must use an NTFS 5.0 partition as the system volume.

FAT performs better on smaller volumes (under 500MB), but NTFS out-performs FAT on larger volumes.

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