You can describe Microsoft as a company that gets the user to test their products rather than design a proper program. However, this article discusses the file system that Microsoft designs for their operating systems. There are references to FAT and NTFS, but they are just names used by the program developers with each new version of Windows.
The NTFS is the file system used in recent versions of Microsoft’s operating system. NTFS is short for New Technology File System. The NTFS came bundled with the following operating systems: Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows NT.
Previous versions of Microsoft’s operating systems all used various versions of the FAT. This File Allocation Table is the file system used in Windows 95, Windows 3000 and MS_DOS. The FAT includes two versions, the FAT16 and the FAT32.
NTFS has many benefits over the FAT system. Not least of all, it is far more reliable and has made the dreaded ‘blue screen’ a thing of the past. This comes as a huge relief to those who struggled with Windows 95 and other FAT file system based computer crashes.
With system problems, the NTFS is far superior to the FAT system because it is a recoverable file system as it creates a log file of all communications made with the file system. This means the recovery process is far simpler and quicker as there is a record of all changes made and you can roll it back to a state before the problem occurred.
The FAT system was liable to fail far more often, as it had several designated special objects. If one of these failed, the sector where the particular special object existed would register a failure.
NTFS does not have any of these special objects, which prevents this problem occurring. It also keeps many copies of the Master File Table, meaning the systems can resort to a backp table in case of a corrupted table.