NTFS

NTFS (New Technology File System) is a Windows NT file system included in versions of Windows NT 3.1, Windows NT 3.5, Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 Windows 10 and Windows 11. It is based on the IBM/Microsoft HPFS file system used in the OS/2 operating system, and also has some influence from the HFS file format designed by Apple.

NTFS allows you to define the cluster size from 512 bytes (minimum size of a sector) independently of the partition size.

It is a suitable system for the large partitions required in high-performance workstations and servers. It can theoretically handle volumes of up to 2⁶⁴–1 clusters. In practice, the maximum supported NTFS volume is 2³²–1 clusters (approximately 16 TiB using 4 KiB clusters).

Its main drawback is that it needs a good amount of hard disk space for itself, so it is not recommended to use it on disks with less than 400 MiB free (approximately 52.4 MB).^{[ citation required]}

Features

The minimum recommended partition size is 10 GB (10240 MB). Although larger sizes are possible, the recommended maximum in practice for each volume is 2 TB (terabytes). The maximum file size is limited by the size of the volume. It has support for sparse files.

There are four versions of NTFS: v1.2 on NT 3.51, NT 4, v3.0 on Windows 2000, and v3.1 on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and v5.1 on Windows Server 2008. These versions They are sometimes called v4.0, v5.0, v5.1, v5.2, and v6.0 in relation to the version of Windows in which they were included. Newer versions have included some new features, such as disk quotas and volume mount points.

• v1.0: Launched with Windows NT 3.1 in 1993. v1.0 is incompatible with v1.1 and later: The volumes written by Windows NT 3.5x cannot be read by Windows NT 3.1 until an update (available on the NT 3.5 via installation) is installed.
• v1.1: Launched with Windows NT 3.5, in 1994.^{[chuckles]required]}
• v1.2: Launched with Windows NT 3.51 in 1995 Supports compressed files, brooks with name and access control lists.
• v3.0: Launched with Windows 2000 Supports disk quotas, file encryption, scattered files, analysis points, the update sequence number (USN) daily, the $ Extender folder and its files. Security descriptors were reorganized so that several files using the same security settings can share the same descriptor.
• v3.1: Launched with Windows XP. In the fall of 2001 extended the master table of files (MFT) entries with redundant MFT registration number (use for recovery of corrupted MFT files).

The NTFS.sys version number (for example, v5.0 on Windows 2000) should not be confused with the version number in NTFS format (v3.1, Windows XP only).

Hard links and junction points

NTFS supports hard links to regular files. This means that you can have multiple files pointing to a single actual file. Aliases are supported on this feature, implemented for the end user from Windows Vista.

There is also another feature of NTFS (>3.0) called Junction NTFS, which allows you to create symbolic links only to directories (not regular files), in a more transparent way than shortcuts to a folder.

Both of these features are not documented for the end user and are not recommended to be used (especially JP) unless the user knows what they are doing. If the link is not given in the shortcut you should look to see if the file exists on disk.

Operation

Everything to do with files is stored in the form of metadata. This allowed for easy feature expansion during the development of Windows NT. An example is found in the inclusion of indexing fields added to enable the operation of Active Directory.

File names are stored in Unicode (UTF-16), and the file structure is in B-trees, a complex data structure that speeds up file access and reduces fragmentation, which was the most criticized of the FAT system.

A transactional record (journal) is used to guarantee the integrity of the file system (but not that of each file). Systems using NTFS have been shown to have improved stability, which was a must considering the unstable nature of older versions of Windows NT.

However, despite what was described above, this file system has a practically secret operation, since Microsoft has not released its code, as it did with FAT.

Thanks to reverse engineering, applied to the file system, drivers such as NTFS-3G were developed, which currently provide GNU/Linux, Solaris, MacOS X or BSD operating systems, among others, with full reading and writing to NTFS partitions.

Interoperability

Microsoft provides means to convert FAT32 partitions to NTFS, but not the other way around (NTFS to FAT32). Symantec's Partition Magic and the open source project NTFSResize are both capable of resizing NTFS partitions.

With the convert utility included in NT systems (Windows NT onwards), you can change a disk with a FAT32 file system to NTFS without losing any data with the "convert command [drive]:/fs:ntfs"

For historical reasons, absolutely all versions of Windows that do not yet support NTFS internally store the date and time as local time, and consequently the file systems corresponding to those versions of Windows also treat the time locally. However, Windows NT and its successors store time in GMT/UTC format, and make the appropriate conversions when displaying dates. Thus, when copying files between an NTFS and a non-NTFS volume, conversions must be done 'on the fly', which can cause ambiguities if daylight saving time is active on the copy of some files and not in the case of others, it may give rise to files whose timestamp is one hour off.

MacOS X provides read-only support for partitions formatted as NTFS. NTFS-3G is a GPL-licensed utility that allows reading and writing to NTFS partitions. The developers of NTFS-3G also provide a commercial, high-performance version called Tuxera NTFS for Mac.