When you work with a computer, you are dealing with files all the time. A file is a named piece of information. Information can be considered both texts, and media, and service data that a computer needs to work.
To successfully process information, it needs to be systematized. This is what file systems do. Their purpose is to provide the ability to conveniently work with data and organize file sharing among multiple processes or users.
A person with experience working at a computer will not store documents, films and games in one folder, which is offered to him by default. It is more convenient to group data by some attribute and place them in the appropriate sections. These sections are called directories.
From a filesystem perspective, a directory is a list that contains information about a group of files. This can be the name of the file, the name of its owner or creator, the physical address on the disk, read-only, hidden, archived, creation and modification times, type (symbolic, binary, temporary), etc.
One of the main tasks of the FS (file system) is the optimal placement of data on the disk. This means that disk space should be used economically, and information retrieval and recording should be done as quickly as possible.
FS is written to the hard disk partition when formatted. One hard drive can contain several file systems. The choice of FS depends on which operating system will be installed on the logical disk.
For Windows OS, NTFS and, less often, FAT32 are used.
A logical drive larger than 32 GB cannot be formatted in FAT322 - such a limitation was imposed by the developers of Microsoft. In addition, this system can handle files up to 4 GB in size.
There is one more significant drawback: FAT32 does not have journaling, i.e. recording of data operations and changes in the state of the system.
On the other hand, the advantage of FAT32 is its relatively high performance and low hardware requirements: it needs 32 MB of RAM for normal operation.
The size of a logical disk that can be formatted to NTFS is 2,000,000 GB. This file system is distinguished by its stability due to journaling and information processing methods. All data operations are performed by a transaction, i.e. the action either completes correctly or is canceled. Failures are recorded in the event log, from where the system takes information for self-healing.
The disadvantage of NTFS is hard disk fragmentation. The built-in defragmentation program practically does not solve the problem due to the peculiarities of writing information to the hard drive.
