The Advantages of NTFS

The NTFS file system, introduced with first version of Windows NT, is a completely different file system from FAT. It provides for greatly increased security, file-by-file compression, quotas, and even encryption. It is the default file system for new installations of Windows XP, and if you're doing an upgrade from a previous version of Windows, you'll be asked if you want to convert your existing file systems to NTFS. Don't worry. If you've already upgraded to Windows XP and didn't do the conversion then, it's not a problem. You can convert FAT16 or FAT32 volumes to NTFS at any point. Just remember that you can't easily go back to FAT or FAT32 (without reformatting the drive or partition), not that I think you'll want to.

Removing Limitations

First, NTFS has greatly increased the size of files and volumes, so that they can now be up to 2^64 bytes (16 exabytes or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes). NTFS has also returned to the FAT concept of clusters in order to avoid HPFS problem of a fixed sector size. This was done because Windows NT is a portable operating system and different disk technology is likely to be encountered at some point. Therefore, 512 bytes per sector was viewed as having a large possibility of not always being a good fit for the allocation. This was accomplished by allowing the cluster to be defined as multiples of the hardware's natural allocation size. Finally, in NTFS all filenames are Unicode based, and 8.3 filenames are kept along with long filenames.

Advantages of NTFS

NTFS is best for use on volumes of about 400 MB or more. This is because performance does not degrade under NTFS, as it does under FAT, with larger volume sizes.

The recoverability designed into NTFS is such that a user should never have to run any sort of disk repair utility on an NTFS partition. For additional advantages of NTFS, see the following:

Microsoft Windows NT Server "Concepts and Planning Guide," Chapter 5, section titled "Choosing a File System"
Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0 Resource Kit, Chapter 18, "Choosing a File System"
Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit "Resource Guide," Chapter 3, section titled "Which File System to Use on Which Volumes"

Disadvantages of NTFS

It is not recommended to use NTFS on a volume that is smaller than approximately 400 MB, because of the amount of space overhead involved in NTFS. This space overhead is in the form of NTFS system files that typically use at least 4 MB of drive space on a 100 MB partition.

Currently, there is no file encryption built into NTFS. Therefore, someone can boot under MS-DOS, or another operating system, and use a low-level disk editing utility to view data stored on an NTFS volume.

It is not possible to format a floppy disk with the NTFS file system; Windows NT formats all floppy disks with the FAT file system because the overhead involved in NTFS will not fit onto a floppy disk.