In compensation for its incompatibility with Windows 9x, NTFS offers a number of important advantages over the earlier FAT and FAT32 file systems:
Security On an NTFS volume, you can restrict access to files and folders using permissions. You can add an extra layer of protection by encrypting files. On a FAT or FAT32 drive, anyone with physical access to your computer can access any files stored on that drive.
Reliability Because NTFS is a journaling file system, an NTFS volume can recover from disk errors more readily than a FAT32 volume. NTFS uses log files to keep track of all disk activity. In the event of a system crash, Windows Vista can use this journal to repair file system errors automatically when the system is restarted. In addition, NTFS can dynamically remap clusters that contain bad sectors and mark those clusters as bad so that the operating system no longer uses them. FAT and FAT32 drives are more vulnerable to disk errors.
Expandability Using NTFS-formatted volumes, you can expand storage on existing volumes without having to back up, repartition, reformat, and restore.
Efficiency On partitions greater than 8 GB, NTFS volumes manage space more efficiently than FAT32. The maximum partition size for a FAT32 drive created by Windows Vista is 32 GB; by contrast, you can create a single NTFS volume of up to 16 terabytes (16,384 GB) using default settings, and by tweaking cluster sizes, you can ratchet the maximum volume size up to 256 terabytes.
Optimized Storage of Small Files Files on the order of a hundred bytes or less can be stored entirely within the Master File Table (MFT) record, rather than requiring a minimum allocation unit outside the MFT. This results in greater storage efficiency for small files.
For more information about the advantages of NTFS and about file-system choices in Windows Vista, see the excellent white paper at http://www.vista-io.com/2801.
