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Other NTFS Features and Advantages

"But wait! There's more!"
   -- TV infomercial pitchmen

Most of the advantages of NTFS compared to simpler, older file systems such as FAT relate to its fundamental characteristics. NTFS offers a superior architecture, support for larger files, security features such as access control and logging, enhanced reliability, and more. Basically, these are all the features and characteristics of the file system that I have been describing in the other sections on NTFS. However, in addition to those key attributes of NTFS, Microsoft has also added some other little goodies. They don't necessarily fit all that well into the other categories so I put them in this convenient "miscellaneous" area.

In this section I discuss some of the "extra" features that help make NTFS an efficient, useful and secure file system. I begin by discussing NTFS's convenient file-based compression feature. I then talk about NTFS POSIX support and attempt to explain what exactly that means. :^) I then talk about how NTFS encryption works, describe NTFS disk quotas, and also explain NTFS's sparse file support.

Note: Several of the features described in this section are found only in the newer NTFS 5.0 version of the file system found in Windows 2000.

Next: Compression

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