NTFS provides a combination of performance, reliability, and compatibility not found in either FAT or HPFS. It is designed to quickly perform standard file operations such as read, write, and search — and even advanced operations such as file-system recovery — on very large hard disks.
It also includes security features required for file servers and high-end personal computers in a corporate environment. NTFS supports data access control and ownership privileges that are important for the integrity of corporate data. While directories shared by a Windows NT Server are assigned particular permissions, NTFS files and directories can have assigned permissions whether they are shared or not. NTFS is the only file system on Windows NT that allows you to assign permissions to individual files.
NTFS has a simple, yet very powerful design. From the file system's perspective, everything on the NTFS volume is a file or part of a file. Every sector on an NTFS volume that is allocated belongs to some file. Even the file system metadata (information that describes the file system itself) is part of a file.
This attribute-based file system supports object-oriented applications by treating all files as objects that have user-defined and system-defined attributes.