File Systems as Fast As Possible

you probably know someone that's always miss placing stuff I do personally whether they can't find their keys in the morning they leave a clothes everywhere like my sweaters they don't even know where that stack of $100 bills is that they want to casino okay honestly I've never done that but anyways could you imagine if your computer was that forgetful and never remembered where you put stuff like savegames important papers or tax documents or your operating system fortunately all computers use some kind of file system so it can keep track of where all your stuff is just like how you might use a closet space or cabinets at home to keep your collection of random clothes and kitchen items from being a complete mess so how do they do that well there are many different types of systems out there but what they all have in common is that they divide up your hard drive SSD or flash drive into small units that store data and have some kind of way of remembering what data is in each unit so it can go and find it later on to better understand how this works and to figure out what system to use for your own stuff let's have a look at some common file system starting off with file allocation table or fat and although it's name is incredibly unflattering that was used by the vast majority of home windows-based pcs until XP came out that worked by splitting the disk into a bunch of clusters giving each cluster a unique ID number then using a table to track what part of what was stored in each cluster alright pretty straightforward and simple no big deal there but as hard drives became larger and larger fat ran into some problems namely it resulted in a lot of wasted space because it often couldn't fill clusters completely a problem called slack and could only support drives that were kind of smaller to the way that fat stored information about file locations fat32 which came to prominence with Windows 98 was an improvement but still couldn't deal with partitions larger than two terabytes which isn't that big these days to overcome these limitations every version of Windows since XP + NT 3.1 on the business side of things has used the only slightly less awkwardly named new technology file system or NTFS NTFS uses some space management tricks to make it use space much more efficiently than fat resulting in better real-world capacity in many cases and can support massive partitions of hundreds of terabytes as well as huge individuals file sizes important in the age of 4k videos that can span multiple hours making the massive it also has features to help prevent data loss in the event of a crash native file compression and security features including native file encryption support to keep out unauthorized users these features have made NTFS an almost universal choice for windows-based pcs these days but just like it's hard to get rid of those last 10 pounds of fat at the gym fat the file system hasn't completely gone away fat32 is still commonly used on USB flash drives to maintain compatibility with older versions of Windows as well as operating systems such as Linux and speaking of flash drives there's a new version of that called exFAT which is surprisingly not the name of a line of diet supplements exFAT was designed specifically with high capacity flash drives and memory cards in mind and support much larger capacities and file sizes than older versions of fat well not including features of NTFS that flash drives don't really need in order to keep things running quickly exFAT isn't always compatible with some quite a bit older versions of Windows though so keep that in mind when choosing what you're going to use for your flash drive if you for some reason are still using like unpatched versions of XP the good thing though is that it's pretty easy to switch file systems on your flash drive by just doing a quick reformat after you've saved your file somewhere else of course I don't want to be responsible for that but no matter what you choose you can bet that your drives will keep track of your data better than your roommate who is always asking you where the TV remote is are you ready for a line of style segue I got this one I got this one speaking of keeping track of things keep track of your education with lynda.com with lynda.com membership you can watch and learn from top experts who are passionate about teaching you can stream thousands of video horses on demand and learn on your own schedule at your own pace you can browse each courses transcript to follow along or to search for a specific keyword that you may have missed and skip to that point in the video which is actually super helpful you can take notes as you go along and refer to them later you can download tutorials to watch them on the go you can access it on iOS Android PC basically whatever the crap you want you can create playlists of courses that you want to watch to customize your learning path or even share with friends and colleagues and even 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Channel: Techquickie

Views: 485,314

Rating: 4.758884 out of 5

Keywords: file system, ntfs, fat, exfat, fat32, fat16, fat12, windows, slack, clusters, chs, cylinder, head, sector, hard drive, hdd, disk drive, ssd, solid-state drive, usb, flash drive, thumb dirve, data, components, partition

Id: BV0-EPUYuQc

Length: 5min 46sec (346 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/isavegas]

Barely touches upon the subject, and only Windows oriented file systems.

[u/amunak]

I know this is supposed to be "as fast as possible" but at least touching on the Linux filesystems would be nice so that people get the idea that there are like more than two filesystems used today.