File System defines how the files and folders are organized in the computer and also specify methods how data is read or written to the storage devices like Hard Disk, CR-ROM etc.
Most file systems make use of sectors. The length of each sector is 512 bytes. The file system specifies how it organizes files and directories in these sectors and also keeps track of which sector is not used and which ones are used.
DOS based system and Windows 9x operating systems use FAT file systems. FAT is File Allocation table, which contains an index file that stores the location of each and every file and directories in the disk. Every time the computer requests for read or write to a file it first accesses the Index file for the location of the file on the hard disk.
Let us look into the features of the most common File Systems used by Microsoft's Windows Operating systems, namely:
- FAT 16
- FAT 32
- NTFS 4
- NTFS 5
