NTFS (New Technology File System) is the primary file system used by Windows.
NTFS (New Technology File System) is a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft Corporation for its Windows line of operating systems, beginning with Windows NT 3.1 and Windows 2000, including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and all their successors to date.
NTFS supersedes the fat file system as the preferred file system for Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.
NTFS has several improvements over FAT and HPFS such as improved support for metadata and the use of advanced data structures to improve performance, reliability, and disk space utilization, plus additional extensions such as security access control lists (ACL) and file system journaling.
Versions
The NTFS on-disk format has five released versions:
- v1.0 with NT 3.1, released mid-1993
- v1.1 with NT 3.5, released fall 1994
- v1.2 with NT 3.51 (mid-1995) and NT 4 (mid-1996)
- v3.0 from Windows 2000 ("NTFS V5.0" or "NTFS5")
- v3.1 from Windows XP (autumn 2001; "NTFS V5.1")
NTFS Log
NTFS is a journaling file system and uses the NTFS Log ($LogFile) to record metadata changes to the volume. It is a critical functionality of NTFS (a feature that FAT/FAT32 does not provide) for ensuring that its internal complex data structures, or data moves performed by the defragmentation API, the modifications to MFT records, and indices will remain consistent in case of system crashes, and allow easy rollback of uncommitted changes to these critical data structures when the volume is remounted.
NTFS on other operating systems
Linux
The ability to read and write to NTFS is provided by the NTFS-3G driver. It is included in most linux distributions.
Mac OS X
Mac OS X 10.3 and later include read-only support for NTFS-formatted partitions.
