File Systems-There are only a handful of file systems used with Windows operating systems. They are discussed in the following sections.

FAT (FAT16)-FAT16 was the original Windows file system for hard disks and served us well for many years. As larger hard disks were introduced, FAT16 lost some of its luster. The FAT16 file system will only recognize partitions up to 2 GB. Nowadays, hard drives far exceed 2 GB, forcing FAT16 users to partition their hard disks into many smaller portions. Another limitation of FAT is in its security. The FAT file system offers no local security on files and folders, making it unsuitable for use on any system where file confidentiality is important.

FAT32-FAT32 was introduced with Windows 95 OSR2, and offers some significant improvements over its predecessor, including more efficient use of hard disk space and support for larger hard disks up to 2 terabytes. Windows 2000 and Windows 9x operating systems, since the release of Windows 95 OSR2, support FAT32. It should be noted, however, that Windows NT 4 does not support FAT32.

NTFS-The NT file system, NTFS, was developed for the Windows NT operating system and offers significant improvements over FAT16 and FAT32 used in Windows 9x systems. In fact, for most applications, it is recommended that NTFS be used on Windows NT and Windows 2000 systems instead of FAT16 or FAT32. NTFS cannot be used on Windows 9x systems.

Some of the main characteristics and features of NTFS include

• Security

Unlike FAT file systems, NTFS offers file- and folder-level security. This means that it is possible to restrict access to files and folders on the local system. FAT partitions offer no local security

Volume size

NTFS allows for a theoretical maximum volume size of up to 2 TB.

• Logging

NTFS offers the ability to log system activities, and in case the system goes down, you can review those logs to help determine the cause of the shutdown.

• Disk performance

NTFS offers a higher level of performance than FAT, particularly with larger files.

• Compression

NTFS offers the ability to compress, on the fly, files on the drive, thus saving hard disk space.

NTFS5

The latest version of NTFS, NTFS5, was introduced with Windows 2000 (the version of NTFS in Windows NT is referred to as NTFS4). In addition to offering the same performance and security benefits of its predecessor, NTFS5 introduces some new features into the mix. Two of the more significant improvements are disk quotas and encryption. Each of these were discussed earlier in the chapter.