By Laurynas Peteraitis File Systems By Laurynas Peteraitis

What is a file system? A file system or filesystem controls how data is stored and retrieved. A file system can be thought of as an index or database containing the physical location of every piece of data on the hard drive or another storage device.

Types of file systems FAT file system NTFS file system Extended file system Disk file system Flash file system Tape file system Database file system Network file system Many many more

FAT file system FAT12 – The initial version of the FAT file system, FAT12 was introduced in 1977, even before MS-DOS and was the primary file system for Microsoft operating systems up to MS-DOS 4.0. FAT12 supported drives up to 32 MB. FAT16 – FAT16 was introduced in 1988. FAT16 was the primary file system for MS-DOS 4.0 up to Windows 95. FAT16 supported drives up to 2 GB. FAT32 – FAT32 is the latest file system of the FAT family. It was introduced in 1996 for Windows 95 and was the primary file system for consumer Windows versions. FAT32 supports drives up to 8TB.

NTFS file system NTFS (New Technology File System)is a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of the Windows NT family. NTFS supports drive sizes up to 256TB.

Is NTFS better than FAT? NTFS has several technical improvements over the file systems that it superseded – FAT and High Performance File System (HPFS) – such as improved support for metadata and advanced data structures to improve performance, reliability, and disk space use. Additional extensions are a more elaborate security system based on access control lists(ACLs) and file system journaling. FAT file system was the primary file system in Microsoft’s older operating systems, but it is still supported today along with NTFS.

Flash file system A flash file system considers the special abilities, performance and restrictions of flash memory devices. Frequently a disk file system can use a flash memory device as the underlying storage media but it is much better to use a file system specifically designed for a flash device. exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) is a Microsoft file system introduced in 2006 optimized for flash memory such as USB flash drives and SD cards. It is proprietary and Microsoft owns patents on several elements of its design.

Aspects of file systems File systems separate data into files , which are primarily described in their filenames, which is used to identify a certain storage location in the file system. File systems typically have directories/folders, which allow the user to group files into separate collections. Folder locations are also hierarchical.

How file systems are used in Win API? We can manipulate with windows file system using file management functions. For example

Some code examples

We have already used some of those functions