Microsoft Windows Operating System Essentials by Tom Carpenter

Author:Tom Carpenter
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Sybex
Published: 2011-11-07T16:00:00+00:00

Of these filesystems, 12-bit File Allocation Table (FAT12) is probably the biggest surprise to most support professionals. This is the original version of FAT, and it is still used in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 today. When a drive or volume smaller than 16 MB is formatted in Windows, it will be formatted with FAT12.

The most common use of FAT12 today is for formatting floppy disks, although even this is becoming less common.

FAT16 is also still used, but only for backward compatibility with older systems that still require it. Such older systems include Windows 3.1 and DOS. If you do not require compatibility with these older systems, FAT32 should be used instead whenever the FAT filesystem is needed. FAT32 supports much larger drives than FAT16 (up to 32 GB compared to only 4 GB) and uses more efficient storage allocation units for larger drives.

The New Technology Filesystem (NTFS) could also be called NTFS64, as it is a 64-bit filesystem. Today, Microsoft simply calls it NTFS and does not indicate that the acronym is still applicable. In addition to supporting very large volumes, NTFS provides support for enhanced features like compression, encryption, and file-level permissions.

The Compact Disk Filesystem (CDFS) and Universal Disk Format System (UDFS or simply UDF) are used on CD and DVD media. UDFS may also be used on additional media types.

In most cases, you only have to choose the filesystem when formatting internal or removable drives larger than a few megabytes (16 MB to be specific). When making your choice, consider the factors in Table 9-1. As you can see from the table, NTFS supports the largest volume sizes, file sizes, and number of files. For this reason alone, it would be a preferred filesystem on larger volumes; however, it also adds enhanced features, as previously mentioned, beyond just the enhanced file size support.

Table 9-1 Comparing Windows filesystems

Windows 7 also introduces several new features to NTFS, including the following:

Files can now be read from a disk at the same time that data is being flushed to the disk using the disk cache manager, which enhances overall system performance.

Short filenames can now be disabled on a volume basis, whereas earlier versions required that they be disabled globally or not at all.

Filesystem metadata related to sparse files and the Encrypting Filesystem (EFS) can now be defragmented.

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