NTFS

NT File System

NTFS

(New Technology File System) The primary Windows file system, starting with Windows NT. Introduced in 1993, 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 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, file system, cluster and EFS.

 FAT16 FAT32 NTFSMaxVolume 4GB 32GB 16TB (using Size 4KB clusters) MaxFile 2GB 4GB 16TB SizeOS DOS OS/2 Win3x Win95 Win95/OSR2 Win98 Win98 WinNT WinNT WinNT(SP4) Win2K Win2K Win2K WinXP WinXP WinXP WinVista Win7 Win8 Win10