The FAT file system was originally used by DOS. Despite its simplicity FAT fairly widespread and occurs in different versions of DOS, Windows Z.h, Windows NT, Macintosh and many flavors of Unix. For this reason, Microsoft recommends using FAT volume in cases where different types of customers need to communicate through a single file system. An important characteristic was the use of FAT file names 8.3 – the file name has a length of up to eight characters before extension by a period, and the enlargement itself has a length of no more than three characters. The FAT32 file system is a fully independent 32-bit file system and provides numerous improvements and additions compared with previous implementations of FAT. Credit: altavista-2011. The difference is that FAT32 is much more efficient uses disk space. FAT32 uses smaller clusters disc compared to previous versions. As a result, compared with FAT16 drives saves an average of 10-15% of disk space.
To work effectively requires a bit of memory. Quick work with small and medium-sized directories. Effective work on slower drives. However, compared with NTFS there are difficulties with random access to large files and very slow work with directories containing many files. The file system NTFS (New Technology File System) contains a number of significant improvements and changes. NTFS perfectly cope with the processing of large data sets and performs well enough when dealing with volumes of 400 MB and above.
As the basis for NTFS directory structures provide an effective data structure, called the 'binary tree', while searching files in NTFS is not linearly related to their number (as opposed to systems based on FAT). NTFS also has some means of self-healing. The complexity of the directory structure and number of files in one directory and does not affect performance. Quick access to arbitrary fragments of the file, quick access to small files. For normal operation, NTFS requires at least 64 MB of RAM. Slow disks and controllers without Bus Mastering greatly reduces the speed of NTFS. NTFS also supports a variety of mechanisms to verify the integrity of the system, including transaction logging, you can play all file writes special system log. NTFS provides security at the file level, which means that access rights to volumes, directories and files can depend on the user's account and the groups to which it belongs. NTFS transaction logs also help to minimize potential data loss. NTFS also has a built-in compression, which can be applied to individual files, entire directories and even volumes (and subsequently cancel or assign them at will). Continuation of the article read here: