What are the hard disk partition formats?

Factory-produced hard drives must go through three processing steps: low-level formatting, partitioning, and high-level formatting (referred to as formatting in this article) before the computer can use them to store data. The low-level formatting of the disk is usually completed by the manufacturer in order to delineate the sectors and tracks available on the disk and mark problematic sectors; users need to use the disk tools provided by the operating system such as "fdisk.exe" ", format.com" and other programs to "partition" and "format" the hard disk.

#According to the current popular operating systems, there are four commonly used partition formats, namely FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and Linux.

FAT16

This is the most common disk partition format in MS-DOS and the earliest Win 95 operating system. It uses a 16-bit file allocation table and can support partitions up to 2GB. It is currently the most widely used disk partition format and the most supported by operating systems. Almost all operating systems support this format, from DOS, Win 95, Win 97 to the current Win 98, Windows NT, Win 2000, and even the popular Linux all support this partition format.

But in the FAT16 partition format, it has one of the biggest disadvantages: low disk utilization efficiency. Because in DOS and Windows systems, disk files are allocated in units of clusters, and a cluster is only allocated to one file, regardless of how much of the entire cluster capacity this file occupies. In this way, even if a file is small, it will occupy a cluster, and the remaining space will be idle there, resulting in a waste of disk space.

Due to the limitation of partition table capacity, the larger the partition supported by FAT16, the larger the capacity of each cluster on the disk, and the greater the waste caused. So in order to solve this problem, Microsoft launched a new disk partition format FAT32 in Win 97.

FAT32

This format uses a 32-bit file allocation table, which greatly enhances its disk management capabilities and breaks through the capacity of each partition of FAT16. 2GB limit. However, in WIN2K&XP systems, due to system limitations, the maximum capacity of a single partition is 32GB.

Due to the current decline in hard disk production costs, its capacity is getting larger and larger. After using the FAT32 partition format, we can define a large hard disk as one partition without having to divide it into several partitions, which is very convenient. Management of disks. Moreover, FAT32 has one of the biggest advantages: in a partition that does not exceed 8GB, the capacity of each cluster in the FAT32 partition format is fixed at 4KB. Compared with FAT16, it can greatly reduce disk waste and improve disk utilization.

Currently, the operating systems that support this disk partition format are Win 97, Win 98 and Win 2000. However, this partition format also has its shortcomings. The first is that disks partitioned in FAT32 format run slower than disks partitioned in FAT16 format due to the expansion of the file allocation table.

In addition, since DOS does not support this partition format, after adopting this partition format, you can no longer use the DOS system. Another point is that FAT and FAT32 format partitions do not support files of 4G and above.

NTFS

Its advantage is that it has excellent security and stability, and it is not easy to cause file fragmentation during use. It can record user operations and impose very strict restrictions on user permissions so that each user can only operate according to the permissions granted by the system, fully protecting the security of the system and data. This format can only be recognized by pure 32-bit Windows systems with NT core. It cannot be recognized by ancient DOS and 16-bit and 32-bit mixed Win95&98 systems.

NTFS is a recoverable file system. Users rarely need to run disk repair programs on NTFS partitions. NTFS ensures partition consistency by using standard transaction logging and recovery techniques. NTFS supports compression of partitions, folders and files. NTFS uses smaller clusters to manage disk space more efficiently.

Linux

Linux was the most popular operating system in 1999. Its disk partition format is completely different from other operating systems. There are two types. One is the Linux Native primary partition, and the other is the Linux Swap swap partition. The security and stability of these two partition formats are excellent. When combined with the Linux operating system, the chance of crash is greatly reduced. However, the only operating system that currently supports this partition format is Linux.

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