File Systems

Every computer we use today almost always has a hard drive. I'm not sure how else you could run one,
quite frankly. Hard Drives store information on little platters, which are shaped like Frisbees,
but made of metal and coated with a magnetic substance. But how exactly is the data organized on
those little platters? They do it with a thing called a file system. File systems are mostly operating
system dependent. This means that almost every operating system has a different type of file
system. Windows is the most widely used operating system in the United States and Europe, so
Windows-compatible file systems are pretty much the standard that most other operating systems
can at least read from.

FAT
The Dos/Windows file system is called File Allocation Table, or just FAT for short. There are 3
types of this FAT file system:
• FAT12. An old 12-bit file system which is mainly used on floppy disks and REALLY small
hard drives.
• FAT16. A 16-bit file system used by DOS-based machines as well as PCs using older
versions of Windows such as 3.x. Windows 9x is FAT16 compatible, but by this time FAT32
was becomining the new norm.
• FAT32. A 32-bit file system most common today.
Whether a partition is going to use FAT12 or FAT16 is based mainly on it's size and version of DOS
you are using. If the partition or disk is 16MB or less in size, it is going to use FAT12. If the
partition is between the size of 17MB and 2048MB, it will use the FAT16 file system.
FAT uses clusters to store files in. Each cluster is a group of sectors. The computer gives each
cluster it's own address, just as each house in a neighborhood has it's own address. The operating
system then keeps track of which files are stored in which clusters. The cluster size is determined by
the partition size as well as the type of FAT system being used. The cluster size is important
because only one file can be stored in a cluster at a time. If you have a cluster that is 32KB, and you
are storing a file in it that is only 1KB, you are wasting 31KB of space on your hard drive. That's
not very big when you look at it in terms of a 2GB hard drive which has 2,097,152KB on the
drive, but when you take a look and realize that there are no files that are perfectly going to fill up
32KB, you are wasting space with every file you have on your hard drive. How can this be
avoided? The smaller the partition you have, the smaller the clusters you will have, and the less
wasted space you will have. Below is a table showing the exact cluster sizes you will get with
partition sizes.
Partition size FAT Type Cluster size
< 16MB FAT12 4KB
17MB-32MB FAT16 2KB
33MB-256MB FAT16 4KB
257MB-512MB FAT16 8KB
512MB-1GB (1024MB) FAT16 16KB
 1GB-2GB (2048MB) FAT16 32KB
There is a slight problem with the FAT16 file system. What would you do if you had a hard drive
larger than 2GB and wanted only 1 partition? FAT32 solved that. It now supports drives up to
2048GB. 2048GB = 2 terabytes. FAT32 also solved the problem of large cluster sizes. Below is
another table, but this compares the size of a FAT32 with it's cluster sizes.
FAT32 Partition Size Cluster Size
< 260MB 512bytes (½KB)
260MB-8GB 4KB
8GB-16GB 8KB
16GB-32GB 16KB
32GB-2048GB (2TB) 32KB
Unfortunately, the ability to make a 260MB FAT32 partition is limited due to the fact that the major
program that makes partitions limits FAT32 drives to 512MB. The improved nature of FAT32 has
caused this file system to be the most common type used. All later versions of Windows either work
primarily with this file system or at least support it (like Windows 2000 and XP, which both allow
FAT32 as an option over NTFS). On version of Windows supporting both FAT16 and FAT32,
Microsoft usually bundles a conversion utility with the operating system to allow you to convert a
FAT16 partition to a FAT32 partition without data loss.
NTFS
NTFS (NT File system) is the major file system used by Microsoft's Windows NT, 2000 and
XP. (Each of these also support the FAT file system). NTFS has features to improve reliability, such
as transaction logs to help recover from disk failures. To control access to files, you can set
permissions for directories and/or individual files. NTFS files are not accessible from other OSs
such as DOS
For large applications, NTFS supports spanning partitions or volumes which means files and
directories can be spread out across several physical disks. This file system is mainly used by the
corporate and power users.
HPFS
High Performance File system is basically a mix between NTFS and FAT. While FAT offers the 8.3
file naming system (8 characters, then a dot, then 3 more characters) HPFS will support up to 256
characters in a file name. This file system is mainly used by OS/2, which was IBM's answer to
Microsoft Windows.
Ext2
Ext2 is a file system used by Linux. The main people that use it are those that run the many
versions of the Linux Operating system.