I'm doing a paper on NTFS vs FAT32 and showing a comparison between both file systems. As far as my knowledge goes, I know that NTFS uses the MFT for holding all the files and directories whereas FAT32 only knows the following cluster for a specific file or directory. This means that FAT32 doesn't know a-priori the first block of a file if not found first by looking up in a specific directory.
My question is the following, if NTFS holds all information regarding the file system in a file does it mean it's going to be faster when doing a raw search for a filename "test.txt" within the system? From what I know, FAT will have to scan every directory in the hard drive and in each directory look if the filename exists whereas in NTFS, it only needs to scan the MFT file which is contiguous for a record that has name : "text.txt". Am I right or I'm missing something?
