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Definition: 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 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