NTFS File System Advantages

The NTFS file system is best for use on volumes of about 400 MB or more, because performance does not degrade as much on larger NTFS volumes as compared to larger FAT volumes. However, if you want to use features that are available only on NTFS, such as file security or compression, you can use NTFS on smaller volumes.

There are several features that are provided only by the NTFS file system:

• You can assign permissions to individual files and folders, so you can specify who is allowed various kinds of access to a file or folder. The NTFS file system offers more permissions than the FAT file system, and you can set permissions for individual users or groups of users.

• The recoverability designed into the NTFS file system is such that a user should seldom have to run any disk repair program on an NTFS volume. In the event of a system crash, the NTFS file system uses its log file and checkpoint information to automatically restore the consistency of the file system.

• The B-tree structure of NTFS folders makes access to files on a large folder faster than access to files on a similar size folder on a FAT volume.

• You can compress individual files and folders on an NTFS volume. NTFS compression enables you to read and write the files while they are compressed, without having to first use a program to uncompress them.

There is more information about each of these features presented later in this chapter.