NTFS turns 30 years old today! I hear it's still in use by some crufty old legacy operating systems 😁 - eviltoast

As a full time desktop Linux user since 1999 (the actual year of the Linux desktop) I wish all you Windows folks the best of luck on the next clean install 👍

…and Happy 30th Birthday “New Technology” File System!

  • Gebruikersnaam@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Honest question: what are the limitations? Most articles online compare it with FAT, which isn’t really an interesting comparison.

    • duncesplayed@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      To the best of my knowledge, most of the limitations are around allocation. NTFS doesn’t allow for extent-based allocation, delayed allocation, uninitialized allocation, etc. It only has one allocation mode, which is the traditional block-at-a-time (actually “cluster”-at-a-time, though NTFS’s clusters are roughly block-sized compared to other filesystems), which is now thought to be slightly less than ideal in terms of allocation performance and fragmentation.

      And…speaking of fragmentation, I believe NTFS still can’t do online defragmentation??? I can’t see anything that contradicts this, but it’s possible I’m out of date.

      There are other small differences. NTFS has unnecessary filename restrictions, like prohibiting " and ? and things. But that’s typically less important.