(
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
ADS,
MFT,
FAT32,
file system,
cluster and
EFS.
FAT16 FAT32 NTFS
Max
Volume 4GB 32GB 16TB (using
Size 4KB clusters)
Max
File 2GB 4GB 16TB
Size
OS DOS
OS/2
Win3x
Win95 Win95/OSR2
Win98 Win98
WinNT WinNT WinNT(SP4)
Win2K Win2K Win2K
WinXP WinXP WinXP
WinVista
Win7
Win8
Win10