file system

Technology has a funny way of sneaking on you, if you fail to update yourself regularly, thinking that you are a guru in the IT world and just like that *snaps fingers*, you are not familiar with what is going on anymore. Everything looks like a mystery to you; trust me; it wouldn’t take long or much for that to happen.
Let us move ahead, we are living in a generation where information is vital to our survival. We keep information about ourselves, music we like and so on and technology has provided us with ways of storing these vital information, different storage devices, different sizes, volumes, removable or not.
Sadly, it is not only having the storage devices that can guarantee efficient storage, but also having the right file system assigned to them. The file system simply manages the access to the data and manages the available space of the device(s) which contain it. It is very vital to map the right file system to the right storage devices, by doing so to increases the efficiency.
Ensuring reliability is a major responsibility of a file system. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner, and may be tuned to the characteristics of the backing device.
We have different file systems but the well known ones include
FAT (File Allocation Table).
The original file system that was meant for removable devices such as floppy disk, flash drives but there was always a problem with it. Let us takeFAT32 (which is part of the FAT family) for example, it limited you to a 4GB file allocation. I am pretty sure it wouldn’t be effective when we are having flash drives of 8GB and 16GB and hard drives going up to 2 TB and it was because of this flaw, that the file system was worked on and improved upon and exFAT came into the light.
exFAT (Extended File Allocation Table) Which was brought in to replace the old FAT system was designed especially for flash drives developed by Microsoft. It doesn’t restrict you to a 4GB like FAT. It can run efficiently on any Operating System.
NTFS ( New Technology File System)
Was developed by Microsoft. Yes, u saw it right. It was used as the file system for Hard drives because NTFS files were not easily damaged. It could however not be used for other removable devices efficiently because it uses a lot of flash memory.
exFAT should be considered a true competitor to NTFS on systems with limited processing power and memory. NTFS on flash memory has been known to be inefficient for quite some time. However, since it wasn’t made for hard drives originally, it cannot completely replace NTFS.
At this point, it might not still be clear to some what we are talking about; here is an illustration to help with that.
Mike is a brilliant guy, graduated top of his class. He could do almost everything, video games, swimming, you name it; but when it came to knowing about computer and computer stuffs, he just could not be bothered. All along, when it comes to using his system, either he had a friend to help him or he guesses what to click pops up requiring his attention and so far so good, it had been working for him. When he was about to resume work at a reputable firm, his fiancée got him a Flash drive (16 GB) and a hard drive because she felt he would be needing them a lot.
So he put the flash in his system, and he was asked to format it. He had 3 options, either FAT32, NTFS or exFAT, he thought to himself, NTFS sounds a lot like NTSC (gamers will understand this better), so it couldn’t be it and exFAT sounds a lot of stress so it couldn’t be either that it had to be FAT32 and since that was the original option then it had to be it. So he selected it, formatted the flash and started to use it.
One day at work, he wanted to copy a file to his flash drive but it kept on saying the drive was full but he could see that there was over 8GB free space left. So he called one of his colleagues to help him out. Immediately, the colleague asked him what file system he used, he quickly said FAT32. His colleague went on to explain the problem and told him that his best option would have been exFAT.
I guess that would have cleared some questions you wanted to ask. If there aren’t any question, lets do a little exercise to know if you understood everything.
QUESTIONS
1)Which of the file System could and should be used on a flash drive of 1gb
2)Which of the file System could and should be used on a flash drive of 4gb
3)Which of the file System could and should be used on a flash drive of 8gb
4)Which of the file System could and should be used on an external Hard drive
ANSWERS
1)exFAT and FAT32
2)exFAT
3)exFAT
4) NTFS
That sums up it all and with that we have gotten to the end of another post.