What is the different between fat32 and NTFS file systems?
Answers:
File Allocation Table (FAT) is a partially patented file system developed by Microsoft for MS-DOS and was the primary file system for consumer versions of Microsoft Windows up to and including Windows Me. FAT as it applies to flexible/floppy and optical disk cartridges (FAT12 and FAT16 without long file name support) has been standardized as ECMA-107 and ISO/IEC 9293.
here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/file_alloca...
NTFS ("New Technology File System") is the standard file system of Windows NT, including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista
see here:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ntfs#versio...
it's simple, FAT32 files cannot be compressed while NTFS can be compressed... when you compress files, you can save a lot of memory space in your hard disk
Popeye has the basics, but there are a few other details. The FAT system was a simpler "library" for File storage and had larger sectors, and thus fewer sectors. A file can only be stored in whole sectors. ex. a 35k file will take up a whole 64k block(sector) for storage, thus many small files ,like icons, and shortcuts, say 1k each will take up a 64k sector. That leaves 63k of wasted HDD space. On older drives ( I still run a 2GB and 4GB HDD in two of my older systems ) that didn't leave alot of extra space. FAT file system also only allowed up to a 2gb partition for the drive. Then FAT32 was created with the new WIN95 ver B. This allowed smaller sectors, and thus saved more HDD space ( btw, this is the space that is recovered if you 'compress' your drive ). I think the drive partition limitation was increased to 30GB. Then as NTFS came out, the File sectors were reduced even more, and saved even more space. And now the HDD partition limitation is beyond any HDD out there ( now there is a 137Gb limit with Win2K SP3 or earlier, and XP SP1). Also NTFS allowed for more security keys to be assigned to files. That is why a user profile will not be allowed access to anothers files, unless they are shared, or they have administrator profile.
Hope all this helps.
Examples of my older drives FAT had 64k sectors, then as formatted to FAT32 it went to 4k sectors, and when I did it in NTFS (back when NT3.5 and 4.0 were around) the sectors were 512 bit or 0.512k sectors. Newer/bigger drives don't get down to 512 bit, but it's still smaller than FAT or FAT32 would get it to for the same size drive
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