New Technology File System features and structure
NTFS (New Technology File System) is a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft for Windows NT and its successors. It offers significant improvements over FAT, including support for metadata, advanced data structures, improved performance, reliability, and disk space utilization. Key features of NTFS include journaling for consistency, access control lists for security, file compression, encryption (EFS), disk quotas, sparse files, and volume shadow copy service. NTFS uses a master file table (MFT) as its central database, containing records for all files and directories on the volume. Each MFT record typically is 1KB in size and contains file attributes, which can be resident (stored within the MFT record) or non-resident (stored in external clusters). NTFS supports very large files and volumes (theoretical limits of 16 exabytes for files and 256 terabytes for volumes), Unicode filenames, and hard links. The file system uses a B-tree structure for directory organization, enabling efficient file searches. NTFS also includes self-healing capabilities through the USN journal and chkdsk utility. While primarily used in Windows environments, NTFS can be read (and sometimes written) by other operating systems through third-party drivers, though with potential limitations in supporting all NTFS features.