hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1580.txt

Episode: 1580
Title: HPR1580: The FAT and NTFS File Systems
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1580/hpr1580.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:15:07

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You
Okay, hello everyone.
My name is JWP and I'm continuing my series of file systems talks that I've been doing.
Okay, one of the file systems that I use today is the FAT file system.
Now I know open source, dot, dot, dot, dot, but nevertheless I use it every day.
And I have a lot of USB sticks and I use portable apps on Linux and I go to internet cafes
and they don't have Linux and I don't want to put my data on any of those internet cafe
things.
So I use a USB stick and so I do a lot of stuff with FAT, okay.
And the FAT file system got its name because of the file allocation table is the name of
the computer file system architecture and a family of industry standard file system
utilizing it.
The FAT file system is a legacy file system which is simple and robust.
It offers good performance even in lightweight implementations, but cannot deliver the same
performance reliability and scalability as some of the modern file systems.
It is however supported for compatible to reasons on nearly all currently developed operating
systems.
Okay, I've never run across an operating system that I couldn't do anything.
It's currently developed for almost everything, so mobile embedded computers, you name it.
And thus it is well suited format for data exchange between computers and devices for
almost any type and age from the early 80s when it was first introduced up and to present.
It was designed in the late 70s for use on floppy disk.
FAT was soon adopted and used universally on hard disk throughout the DOS and Windows 90
X errors for two decades.
And with the interleation of more powerful computers, the operating systems as well as the
development of more complex file systems for them, FAT is no longer the default file system
for Microsoft Windows.
Okay, so today, file systems that use FAT are commonly found on floppy disks or those
that still use them, USB sticks, flash and other solid state memory cards and modules.
Many portable and embedded devices, DCF implementations of FAT as a standard file system for
digital cameras.
FAT is also utilized in boot storage of EFI compliant computers.
The name of the file system originates from the systems prominent usage of the index table.
The FAT statistically advocated time formatting.
The table contains, I'm sorry, contains for each cluster a continuous area of distortion.
Each entry contains either a number of the cluster in the file or else a marker indicating
the end of the file, unused to space or special reserved areas of the disk.
The root directory of the disk contains the number of the first cluster of each file in
that directory and the operating system can then transfer the FAT table looking up cluster
number for each excessive part of the disk file as the cluster chain until the end of the
file is reached.
In much the same way that sub-directories are implemented as special files containing
the directory entries of their respective files.
As disk drives have evolved, the maximum number of clusters has significantly increased.
So the number of bits used to identify each cluster has grown.
The successive versions of FAT format are named after the number of table elements.
So 12 is FAT 12, 16 is FAT 16 and 32 is FAT 32.
Each of these various is still in use.
The FAT standards has also been expanded in other ways while generally preserving backward
compatibility.
So my USB 1 USB disk 64 megabytes is still able to be read on my USB 3E connector.
Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and continue because with the NTFS and the reason is is because
FAT was used by Microsoft on the X98 series and NTFS is another thing that if you work
in an enterprise, you have to use NTFS, okay?
And so NTFS is the new technology file system.
It's a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft and it started with NTFS 3.1.
It's the default file system of the Windows NTFamily, okay?
NTFS has several technical improvements over FAT and HPFS high performance file system.
The file systems that it superseded such as improved support for metadata and the use
of advanced data structures to improve the performance and reliability of disk and space
utilization, plus additional extensions such as access control list, ACL, and file system
journaling.
Okay, so this is how Microsoft did XD, so with the journaling thing, so it starts.
In the mid-80s, Microsoft and IBM formed a joint project to create the next generation
of graphical operating system.
The result of the project was OS2, but Microsoft and IBM disagreed on many important issues
that eventually separated OS2, remained an IBM project and Microsoft worked on NTFS.
The OS2 file system, or HPFS, combined several new features.
When Microsoft created their new operating system, they borrowed many of these concepts
for NTFS, probably the result of this common angestiary, HPFS, and NTFS share the same
dispartition identification type, code 07, sharing and ideas unusual, since there are dozens
of available codes and other major file systems have their own code, FAT has more than
defined, each one for FAT 12, FAT 16, FAT 32, algorithms identifying the file system
in a partition type 07 must perform additional checks.
Okay, so that's Microsoft and what they did with their file systems from about 1980 to present.
Okay, as always, I hope you enjoyed this.
If you have any comments, please email jwp5athopnell.com.
Thank you very much for your time.
Bono.
Bono.