NTFS vs FAT32 vs exFAT - Everything You Need To Know

hello my name's gary sims and this is gary explains now when you write data to a storage medium whether it's a hard drive or an ssd or an sd card or a micro sd card or a usb flash drive you need to write the data in such a way that it can be found again you can't just write it randomly on a two terabyte drive and then hope that you'll trip over it one day when you need it it needs to be organized and that organization is called a file system now as with many things in computers there are many many types of file systems in this world and there are many many ones to choose from and when it comes to the world of windows there are three main file systems that are important that's ntfs exfat and fat32 and today i want to look at those three and discover the differences between them and talk about which ones you should be using so if you want to find out more please let me explain so as i said when you store a file on a disk the operating system needs to know where the file is physically located it needs to have a way to associate a file name with that file contents plus there might be other things like folders file permissions etc that need to be associated with each file now this structure how the raw data is organized on the disk is called a file system now you create a file system when you format a drive which in the linux world would be make file system or mkfs and so format and make file system are synonymous in this context now just like computer programming languages or javascript frameworks there are many types of file systems and as i already mentioned on windows we're going to be looking at fat32 xfat and ntfs to name a few others hfs hfs plus and apfs are apples file systems and on linux of course you've got ext4 xfs jfs uh butter fs zfs and so on now one key thing to note is that some os can understand file systems from other operating systems so for example mac os can understand fat32 and that will be important for us to look at in a moment so let's start with fat32 in fact let's start with fat eight so fat eight fat 12 fat 16 of fat 32 now back in the late 70s microsoft produced its first version of a file system called fat file allocation table fat it was originally developed caused for use with floppy disks however over the years now it's found its way onto hard drive usb flash drives and ssd cards and it was the default file system for windows up until windows xp when ntfs took over and we'll talk more about that in a moment now there have been several different variations of fat based around the size of the table because it's a fire allocation table that holds information about the files and as i mentioned that's fat 8 fat 12 fat 16 and fat 32 the original fat used eight bit entries and it's a day referred to as fat eight then came fat 12 and then when we had our first hard drives in the ibm pcat we got fat 16 and from windows 95 release 2 we got fat 32 nowadays fat 32 is almost universally understood not only by pcs running windows but also linux and mac os but also cameras media players game consoles smart tvs android phones and so on but it has some limits the native disks maximum disk size for fat32 is 32 gigabytes uh up to two terabytes is possible with third-party tools not necessarily using the default windows tools and there is a theoretical maximum of 16 terabytes however there is a fixed maximum size of a file which is four gigabytes and there's no way around it four gigabytes is the biggest file possible on a fat32 system now fat32 is the official format for sd and sd hc cards so that's sds up to 2 gigabytes sdhc up to 32 gigabytes that is the official format for those cards and it's also therefore also the defacto standard for many usb flash drives and even some types of external hard drives so if we look here at the sd card format you've got sd card originally we're up to two gigabytes fat32 sdhc 32 gigabytes fat32 and then once you go over that 32 gigabytes you've now got sdxc that supports up to two terabytes and we use exfat which is something we're going to be talking about in a minute so notice the difference when you get a bigger sd card it actually changes the file system and it's important to know that because sometimes you might get caught out because a 32 gigabyte card might work in a particular camera or a tv or media player and then you put in a bigger one it doesn't work and you don't know why and it might be because of the file system difference so since we mentioned exfat let's have a look at that it's the extended file allocation table it's another microsoft design it was first introduced in 2006 as part of windows ce 6.0 it allows for files larger than four gigabytes that's important and it was adopted by the sd card association for the default file system of cards greater than 32 gigabytes and its limits we could talk about the limits but really they're measured in petabytes and exabytes so not something we need to worry about quite now now what's interesting is since fat32 and xfat belong to microsoft this is in fact how microsoft has made billions of dollars in the past from ecosystems like android and also other things like media players and smart tvs because if an oem wanted to use fat32 or exfat it needed to pay a license fee to microsoft now that situation may have slightly changed with microsoft softening its approach to linux and of course android is um based on linux however i'm pretty sure that microsoft are still making money from uh licensing factors doing expat particularly xfat because i have a synology nas drive i've got a review about it here on this channel and if you want exfat access on that synology this is a commercial product that i bought paid hundreds of dollars for it if you actually want to be able to access xfat drives you need to pay an extra four dollars so i need to pay that to synology they'll give me a license thing it will work out here it gets activated on the drive and i'm pretty sure a big chunk of that four dollars goes directly to microsoft okay moving away from x fact now on to ntfs nt stands for new technology that's what windows nt ntfs the new technology file system was developed for windows nt 3.1 and it was a default file system for all of the windows nt family of operating system right up of course until windows xp which kind of combined nt and the traditional windows framework together and you get xp onwards and then ntfs became the default uh for windows including windows 10 which you may well be using today again the file sizes are measured in exabytes so 16 exabytes so not something we have to worry about however there are some differences with ntfs that you don't get in fat32 or in exfat you get file permissions there is compression and there is incre encryption that is all built in at the file system level but the biggest difference is that ntfs is a journaling file system now what do i mean by that there are two types of data that is stored when you actually write some data to a disk there's the actual file content so the actual pixels the data that's making up the pixels of your photograph you're storing and then some metadata about the file so that might be the file name its permissions what folder it's in and so on now when you delete a file you don't actually delete the data the file content all you need to do is remove that metadata saying this file the index to it this file no longer exists so i'm destroying it the actual data can remain on the hard drive or on the other flash drive because it just get over it naturally as things progress onto the drive and it's the same with a rename or moving a file to another folder you don't actually need to move the physical data you just need to move the file that points to it the metadata that points to it say well actually now this file's been moved into this directory actually it's the same file we won't rewrite the three gigabytes on the hard drive we'll just change those few bytes of metadata so that it's now pointing that it's in a different folder on your hard drive now some of these operations we talked about deleting and renaming take multiple steps so for example if you wanted to rename a file you might need to create the new file metadata in its new folder and then you might want to remove the old metadata you certainly don't want to leave it in limbo where you've removed it before you've created the new one but if the system does crash between those two steps the file system is now in an inconsistent state now of course this is a simple example there are some more complicated operations that happen on a file system that could leave it in a significantly inconsistent state where what on the hard drive and what's in the metadata don't match up now a journal stores the intention of the file system before it starts this is the important thing it says i'm about to do these operations okay and the journal records what the os wanted to do and then once it's done all those things the operation is complete now if a crash occurs in between these operations that is already written into the journal then the os at reboot looks at the journal and says right let's see whether how far along we got and it looks at the files it looks at the metadata oh i see we're in the middle of doing a rename here we're in the middle of doing a delete i know what i need to do to carry on and by reapplying going over the journal again and checking the steps you can actually bring the file system up to a more consistent state very very quickly which ultimately reduces system corruption due to unexpected restarts now the thing to emphasize is you don't get this on fat32 or exfat this is something you get on ntfs you also get it on other file systems like ext4 for example you also get it on apple's file system but it's not what you get on your traditional sd card now the thing about ntfs is it's got a compatibility issue it's very much a windows thing as i said right back to windows nt now there are some clean room implementations for linux and mac os not written by microsoft other people have had to go understanding the way ntfs works so there is mac os support for reading read-only support on ntfs linux has support for read-only since way back the linux kernel 2.2 and there is now also this project called ntfs 3g which does have read and write support however there are often questions around performance and compatibility because these are all coming from that kind of clean room implementation trying to guess how it's working not coming from microsoft so overall it's okay if you want to access an ntfs drive because you happen to have one plugged in and you need to get some data off it something you might do occasionally but certainly not something you would use as a primary file system outside of the windows ecosystem so that brings us to the question which one should you use well obviously if you're using a pc or a laptop of some kind then you need to use the native file system for that os so ntfs for windows 10 apfs for mac os and then ext4 xfs or whatever is the default file system for your linux distro when it comes to other things like sd cards then things get a bit more tricky so sd cards use fat32 by default if it's smaller than 32 gigabytes exfat if it's greater but some devices don't support exfat so if you read around some of the consoles the older generations of consoles the raspberry pi for example can't boot from an x uh fat sd card even when it's greater than 32 gigabytes so you have to be able to find a way to format some of these cards using fat32 to give you that greater compatibility now you can do that using the well-known program rufus just type in rufus and you'll find that on google or the raspberry pi imager both of those can format fat32 drives greater than 32 gigabytes so a useful tool when you've got another device a camera a console raspberry pi that you want to use 128 gigabyte sd card but you need to use it in fat32 now for external hard drives of course if you're just using it on your windows pc on your mac then you just format it using the native os i have an external hard drive for one of my older mac and i just use it in the mac format that it was using uh apfs because i'm not taking it from one machine to another it's used there just to expand the storage on my mac however the external hard drives that will be used on multiple devices so if you're taking a small portable drive one terabyte two terabytes whatever from one pc to another from one computer to another even plugging it into a console plugging into a smart tv into a media player then you're going to need to use a file system that's understood that's not ntfs you're definitely going to want to be using xfat or fat32 and the same rules apply as i mentioned here depends on whether your device understands exfat or whether you're going to need to use it in fat32 and format it using one of these extra tools that can allow you to format that drive uh using the older file system the good news is that as we go on more and more devices are understanding exfat newer game consoles understand ex fat and so on however there may always be this case when you need to use fat32 to maintain compatibility with multiple devices okay that's it my name is gary sims and this is gary explains now if you like this video please do give it a thumbs up also it's best not to rely on the youtube recommendation algorithm because it may not have showed you this video instead it's better to subscribe and hit that bell notification icon okay that's it i'll see in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Gary Explains

Views: 33,230

Keywords: Gary Explains, Tech, Explanation, Tutorial, NTFS, exFAT, FAT32, File Allocation Table, Extended File Allocation Table, New Technology File System, File System, Format Disk, mkfs, Windows, Windows 10, macOS, Linux, File Systems Explained, 4GB Limit, 4GB File Size Limit, SD Card, microSD card

Id: qsP_sBUbmZM

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021