NTFS: A File System with Integrity and Complexity
Linked by Andrew Hudson on Mon 29th Nov 2010 21:50 UTC
Windows NTFS is the file system used by Windows. It is a powerful and complicated file system. There are few file systems that provide as many features and to fully cover them all would require a book. And in fact there is a book detailing NTFS, and it's already out of date. The purpose of this article is not to cover all of the features of NTFS, nor will it exhaustively cover NTFS features in detail. Instead we will cover its basic structure and then describe some of its more advanced features and provide use examples where possible. We will focus more on what it does, rather than how it does it. Trying to walk the line between informative and detailed is difficult and so this article contains a lot of references for people who hunger for more detail.
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RE: Nitpicks
by gus3 on Tue 30th Nov 2010 18:08 UTC in reply to "Nitpicks"
gus3
Member since:
2010-09-02

File compression

The on-disk representation of NTFS compression requires a lot of synchronization and reallocation, which leads to fragmented files that are very slow to access. This feature should only be used when space is more important than speed (which is becoming increasingly rare.)


The other instance I can think of, where compression can be beneficial, is to minimize the number of writes to the underlying storage medium. In the old days of sub-200MHz CPU's and non-DMA drive controllers, the time saved on disk I/O was a win over the extra CPU work of compression and decompression.

Today, the same might be useful for increasing flash longevity. Even with wear leveling, flash can take only so many writes. (Then again, one must question the wisdom of using any journaling FS on flash...)

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