NTFS Review

NTFS or New Technology File System, is a file system that is supplied by Microsoft in the Windows NT operating system family, which consists of Windows NT 3.x (NT 3.1, NT 3.50 3.51, NT), the Windows NT 4.x (NT 4.0 with all his service pack), Windows NT 5.x (Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003), as well as Windows NT 6.x (Windows Vista, Windows 7).

The NTFS file system has a simple design but have more capabilities than the FAT file system family. NTFS offers several features that are needed in a distributed environment, such as setting permissions (access control) anyone who has the right to access a file or directory, setting quotas how much each user can use the capacity of hard disk encryption feature, as well as tolerance towards faults (fault tolerance). The standard features of a file system directory, such as hashing, directory caching, the use attribute of the directory, and the file attributes of course has been owned by NTFS. In fact, Microsoft has added a great capability into NTFS in order to have higher performance, higher than the previous kind of file system HPFS or FAT, in particular on the size of the volume is great, but also retaining the ease of operation. One of the advantages of NTFS file system compared to others is that NTFS is extensible (can be extended) by adding a new function in the operating system, without having to overhaul the design as a whole (possible reshuffle, but not significantly).

Features of NTFS

The following sections will give you a bit of information about some of the features of NTFS:

• NTFS can set the quota volume for each user (in NTFS Disk Quota referred to).
• NTFS supports file system transparently encrypted with the use of some type of encryption algorithms that are commonly used.
• Supports NTFS data compression transparently, though it did not have a large ratio, can be used to save hard disk space usage. In addition, NTFS supports file creation with sparse attributes (file that contains many empty areas in the data) that are generally required by scientific applications.
• NTFS supports hard links (hard link) as well as symbolic links (symbolic link) as well as file system in UNIX-family operating systems, although in NTFS, the implementation is simpler. Symbolic link feature in the NTFS Reparse Point is implemented by using the originally could only be applied to the directory. Windows Vista allows the use of symbolic link to the file.
• NTFS supports file naming method of encoding Unicode (16-bit, UCS2) up to 255 characters. In contrast to the FAT file system that still uses ANSI encoding (8-bit ASCII) and oriented only 8.3 format. Use long names in the FAT file system will spend more than two directory entries. The tables below mention the characteristics comparison between NTFS and FAT32 file systems FAT16.
• NTFS has features to accommodate more than one piece of data in a file room. This feature is called with alternate data streams.

Versions of NTFS

For 16 years the development of Windows NT (1991-2007), NTFS has several times had improved functions and features. Even though it happened a few times improved functions and features, among those still present every version compatibility is much needed by the systems of old. The following are some version of NTFS:

• NTFS version 1.0 is the version that comes with Windows NT 3.1. This version offers basic functionality, but is much better compared to the FAT file system that has been used.
• NTFS version 1.1 is the version that comes with Windows NT 3.50. This version adds support for access control in discrete (discretionary access control).
• NTFS version 1.2 is the version that comes with Windows NT 4.0. This version adds support for auditing each file and also transparent compression.
• NTFS version 2.0 was not released publicly, due to various constraints that affect them, which was not announced by Microsoft (Microsoft's NTFS version 2.0 project, and direct step on the NTFS version 3.0, considering the number of features added in version 3.0).
• NTFS version 3.0 is a version that comes with Windows 2000. This version offers many improvements compared to previous versions. Among them is the establishment of quotas to individual users, Encrypting File System (EFS), a security system that can be regulated from a central server, features indeksasi of the properties and contents of each file, and others. In addition, version 3.0 also offers support to the structure in addition to MBR (Master Boot Record), namely GPT (GUID Partition Table) and LDM (Logical Disk Management).
• NTFS version 3.1 is the version that came with Windows XP Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2003. This version offers minor improvements that occurred in earlier versions (especially in the field of performance), and also replacement of the encryption algorithm used by EFS from DESX or 3DES to be AES-256.

Despite its superiority compared to FAT file system, NTFS internal design is actually based on the structure of disk-based Master Boot Record, same as FAT16 or FAT32 file system. By using a structure that is based on the use of MBR process for all the files that can be stored on a disk, then the displacement or migration of the FAT file system to NTFS is also easy to do: just change some FAT to NTFS system components only. In addition, the structure of the MBR is one way of allocating files on hard disks that are very popular and most commonly used, since allocating disk with MBR scheme used on Intel's x 86 platform. There are five pieces of a program that can be used to create a NTFS volume, Disk Administrator (in Windows NT 3.1, Windows NT 3.5 and Windows NT 3.51, the Disk Management snap-in (Windows NT family version 5.x), as well as three fruit-based utility command line i.e. format.com (on all versions of Windows NT), the Diskpart.exe utility, and utility convert.exe.

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