Download FAT:

Daffodil Institute of IT
Course Name: IDCS
Assignment Title: Differences Between FAT & NTFS
Submitted By
Submitted To
Kaberi Parvin
Romman sir
Batch: 47 (IDCS)
Roll: 74
FAT:
FAT stands for File Allocation Table. FAT is a computer file system architecture
now widely used on most computer systems and most memory cards, such as those
used with digital cameras. It was developed by Bill Gates and Marc McDonald during
1976–1977.[1][2] It is the primary file system for various operating systems including DRDOS, OpenDOS, FreeDOS, MS-DOS, OS/2 (v1.1) and Microsoft Windows (through
Windows Me). For floppy disks, it has been standardized as ECMA-107[3] and ISO/IEC
9293.Those standards include only FAT12 and FAT16 without long filename support;
long filenames with FAT is partially patented.
The FAT file system is relatively straightforward technically and is supported by
virtually all existing operating systems for personal computers. This makes it an ideal
format for solid-state memory cards and a convenient way to share data between
operating systems. The FAT file system was created for managing disks in Microsoft
Standalone Disk BASIC. In August 1980 Tim Paterson incorporated FAT into his 86DOS operating system for the S-100 8086 CPU boards;[6] the file system was the main
difference between 86-DOS and its predecessor, CP/M. The successive major versions
of the FAT format are named after the number of table element bits: 12, 16, and 32. The
FAT standard has also been expanded in other ways while preserving backward
compatibility with existing software. Below a few details of each type are shown:
FAT12: The initial version of FAT is now referred to as FAT12. Designed as a file
system for floppy diskettes, it limited cluster addresses to 12-bit values, which not only
limited the cluster count to 4078, but made FAT manipulation tricky with the PC's 8-bit
and 16-bit registers. (Under Linux, FAT12 is limited to 4084 clusters.) The disk's size is
stored as a 16-bit count of sectors, which limited the size to 32 MB. FAT12 was used by
several manufacturers with different physical formats, but a typical floppy diskette at the
time was 5.25-inch, single-sided, 40 tracks, with 8 sectors per track, resulting in a
capacity of 160 KB for both the system areas and files. The FAT12 limitations exceeded
this capacity by a factor of ten or more.
FAT16: In November 1987, Compaq DOS 3.31 (an OEM version of MS-DOS 3.3
released by Compaq with their machines) introduced what is today called the FAT16
format, with the expansion of the 16-bit disk sector count to 32 bits. The result was
initially called the DOS 3.31 Large File System. Although the on-disk changes were
minor, the entire DOS disk driver had to be converted to use 32-bit sector numbers, a
task complicated by the fact that it was written in 16-bit assembly language.
FAT32: In order to overcome the volume size limit of FAT16, while still allowing
DOS real mode code to handle the format without unnecessarily reducing the available
conventional memory, Microsoft implemented a newer generation of FAT, known as
FAT32, with cluster values held in a 32-bit field, of which 28 bits are used to hold the
cluster number, for a maximum of approximately 268 million (228) clusters. This allows
for drive sizes of up to 8 terabytes with 32KB clusters, but the boot sector uses a 32-bit
field for the sector count, limiting volume size to 2 Terabytes on a hard disk with 512
byte sectors.
Here are some specific facilities that FAT32 provides:

Fat 32 allows access to win 95 98 win Millennium win2k Xp on local partition.

Maximum size of partition is upto 2 TB.

Maximum File size is upto 4 GB.

File & folder Encryption is not possible.

In FAT file system then Security and Quota tap is not available.
NTFS:
NTFS (Windows NT File System) is the standard file system of Windows NT,
including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003,
Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. NTFS supersedes the FAT file
system as the preferred file system for Microsoft’s Windows operating systems. NTFS
has several improvements over FAT and High Performance File System such as
improved support for metadata and the use of advanced data structures to improve
performance, reliability, and disk space utilization, plus additional extensions such as
security access control lists and file system journaling. The file system specification is a
trade secret, although it can be licensed commercially from Microsoft through their
Intellectual Property licensing program.
In the mid 1980s Microsoft and IBM formed a joint project to create the next
generation graphical operating system. The result of the project was OS/2, but
eventually Microsoft and IBM disagreed on many important issues and separated. OS/2
remained an IBM project. Microsoft started to work on Windows NT. The OS/2 file
system HPFS contained several important new features. When Microsoft created their
new operating system, they borrowed many of these concepts for NTFS. When
Microsoft created their new operating system, they borrowed many of these concepts for
NTFS. Probably as a result of this common ancestry, HPFS and NTFS share the same
disk partition identification type code (07). Sharing an ID is unusual since there were
dozens of available codes, and other major file systems have their own code. FAT has
more than nine (one each for FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, etc.). Algorithms which identify the
file system in a partition type 07 must perform additional checks.
Here are some advantages or important features of the NTFS file system:

Alternate data streams allows files to be associated with more than one data
stream. For example, a file such as text.txt can have an ADS with the name of
text.secret (of form filename: streamname) that can only be accessed by knowing
the ADS name or by specialized directory browsing programs.

Similar to Unix mount points, where the root of another file system is attached to
a directory. In NTFS, this allows additional file systems to be mounted without
requiring a separate drive letter (like C: or D:) for each.

Hierarchical Storage Management is a means of transferring files that are not
used for some period of time to less expensive storage media. When the file is
next accessed the reparse point on that file determines that it is needed and
retrieves it from storage.

The Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) keeps historical versions of files and
folders on NTFS volumes by copying old, newly-overwritten data to shadow copy
(copy-on-write). The old file data is overlaid on the new when the user requests a
revert to an earlier version. This also allows data backup programs to archive
files currently in use by the file system. On heavily loaded systems, Microsoft
recommends setting up a shadow copy volume on a separate disk.
References:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
 http://www.allinterview.com
 http://www.techcrunch.com