FAT & NTFS

FAT is a very simple form of file system, named for the fact that it organizes files by listing them in a table. There are three varieties of the FAT file system in use today (well, theoretically). FAT12 (floppy drive version, FAT16 introduced with MS-DOS 3.0 to enable support for large drives and FAT32 which is the preferred file system for Windows 95, 98 and Me and supports long filenames. The majority of systems are formatted with FAT32 as the default. The partition size limit for FAT32 is approximately 128GB. The two main drawbacks no version of the FAT file system provides built-in security or data compression methods. NTFS (New Technologies File System or New Type) has all of the basic capabilities of FAT, and it provides a few advantages over the FAT and FAT 32 file systems:access rights can be assigned to files and directories, allowing users full access, partial access or no access at all to data on your hard disk, NTFS supports very large volumes up to 2 TB in size, it maintains a log that can be used to recover and repair a volume's content in the event of a system failure, file and directory compression can be performed directly without the need for third party utilities, saving space, while allowing for transparent access and operation to the user, the NTFS 5.0 file system can automatically encrypt and decrypt file data as it is read and written to the disk. NTFS is the native file system that Windows 2000 and Windows XP uses. NTFS volumes are not accessible under MS-DOS, Windows 95, or Windows 98.If dual boot is required or the volume is smaller than 400MB, then the FAT32 is the choice. Otherwise go for NTFS. And there's the possibility of using dynamic storage in Windows 2000 and XP, which is a standard that creates a single partition that includes the entire disk. A disk that you initialize for dynamic storage is a dynamic disk. One advantage of using dynamic disks is that you can size and resize a dynamic disk without restarting Windows 2000 and you can use a stripped volume (RAID-0).