File Systems and The Windows file systems

File Systems and The Windows file systems

Time Shaver Focus on the primary file system supported by each operating system. But, just so you have some knowledge of what each is about, review the following items:

l FAT: A table used by DOS and early releases of Windows 3. x to place and locate files on a disk. It also tracks the pieces of fragmented files.

l VFAT: The 32-bit file system used in Windows for Workgroups and older releases of Windows 95. VFAT served as an interface between applications and the physical FAT. I think its most outstanding feature was that it supported long filenames.

l FAT32: The file system used in Windows 95 (OEM Service Release (OSR) 2) and Windows 98. It supports larger disk capacities (up to two terabytes), and because it uses a smaller cluster size, it produces more efficient storage utilization. Windows 2000 supports FAT32 with disk volumes of up to 32GB.

l HPFS: The file system supported by IBM's OS/2 operating system. It supports disk drives as large as 2TB and individual files as large as 2GB and 256-byte filenames. HPFS coexists on a system with an existing FAT file system.

l NTFS: Introduced with the Windows NT operating system and supported under Windows 2000 as NTFS 5.0, which is not completely backward compatible. Windows NT and 2000 also support FAT32 and the legacy FAT file systems as well. NTFS features transaction logs to help recover from disk failures, has the capability to set permissions at the directory or individual file level, and enables files to span several physical disks.

l CDFS and UDF: Windows 98 and 2000 also support two CD-ROM and optical disk file systems, the CDFS (CD File System), and the UDF (Universal Disk Format). UDF is slowly replacing CDFS as the standard optical disk file system.