NTFS
| Developer(s) | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Full name | NT File System |
| Introduced | July 27, 1993 with Windows NT 3.1 |
| Partition IDs | 0x07 (MBR) EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7 (GPT) |
| Structures | |
| Directory contents | B-tree variant |
| File allocation | Bitmap |
| Bad blocks | $BadClus (MFT Record) |
| Limits | |
| Max volume size | 264 clusters − 1 cluster (format); 256 TB − 64 KB (Windows 10 version 1703, Windows Server 2016 or earlier implementation) 8 PB − 2 MB (Windows 10 version 1709, Windows Server 2019 or later implementation) |
| Max file size | 16 EB − 1 KB (format); 16 TB − 64 KB (Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2 or earlier implementation) 256 TB − 64 KB (Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 or later implementation) 8 PB − 2 MB (Windows 10 version 1709, Windows Server 2019 or later implementation) |
| Max no. of files | 4,294,967,295 (232−1) |
| Max filename length | 255 UTF-16 code units |
| Allowed filename characters | |
| Features | |
| Dates recorded | Creation, modification, POSIX change, access |
| Date range | 1 January 1601 – 14 Sept 30828 (File times are 64-bit positive signed numbers counting 100-nanosecond intervals (ten million per second) since 1601, which is more than 32,000 years) |
| Date resolution | 100 ns |
| Forks | Yes (see § Alternate data stream (ADS) below) |
| Attributes | Read-only, hidden, system, archive, not content indexed, off-line, temporary, compressed, encrypted |
| File system permissions | ACLs |
| Transparent compression | Per-file, LZ77 (Windows NT 3.51 onward) |
| Transparent encryption | Per-file, DESX (Windows 2000 onward), Triple DES (Windows XP onward), AES (Windows XP Service Pack 1, Windows Server 2003 onward) |
| Data deduplication | Yes (Windows Server 2012) |
| Other | |
| Supported operating systems | Windows NT 3.1 and later Mac OS X 10.3 and later (read-only) Linux kernel version 2.6 and later Linux kernel versions 2.2–2.4 (read-only) FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD (read-only) ChromeOS Solaris ReactOS (read-only) |
NT File System (NTFS) (commonly called New Technology File System) is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s.
It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with FAT. NTFS adds several features that FAT and HPFS lack, including: access control lists (ACLs); filesystem encryption; transparent compression; sparse files; file system journaling and volume shadow copy, a feature that allows backups of a system while in use.
Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family superseding the File Allocation Table (FAT) file system. NTFS read/write support is available on Linux and BSD using NTFS3 in Linux and NTFS-3G in BSD.
NTFS uses several files hidden from the user to store metadata about other files stored on the drive which can help improve speed and performance when reading data.
NTFS was slated to be replaced by WinFS, one of the anchor features of the Longhorn platform, however WinFS was cancelled after Microsoft was unable to resolve performance problems with the filesystem.