The file system that the Windows have is the New Technology File System or NTFS which is designed to satisfy the high-end demands for servers and workstations. The features that NTFS provides are its recoverability, security, large disks and files, various streams of data, stores all changes that are made to files, and the capacity for the files to be compressed or encrypted. NTFS utilizes concepts on disk storage such as sector, cluster and volume. Each of the elements that are on a volume is considered as a file and each of these file contains a set of attributes. The first few parts on a volume are being used by the sector of a partition boot.
The partition boot holds the information of the volume layout and it creates a volume that is bootable. Next is master file table (MFT) that have all the information on the files and folders that are in the volume of NTFS. The system files which are about 1 megabyte in size and it includes MFT2, a series of transaction steps that are used, cluster bitmap and a definition table for the attributes. The I/O manager in windows consists of the NTFS driver that handles different functions of the NTFS.
Its components have a service for log files, management of cache to increase its performance and it manages the virtual memory in which the NTFS enters the cached files. The Windows OS helps in the accessibility of the file system formats to the local system and remote clients. The filter driver of the file system gives a clean way in extending and augmenting the access to the file system. Reliability, security and scalability of the file system format for the system storage of the local file have been provided by the NTFS. In Windows, programs execute I/O on virtual files and they are manipulated through file handles.
File objects have names that are in hierarchy, protection by the object-based security, it provides synchronization and are managed by object services. When object files are created, it helps in bridging the gap between the features or attributes of the physical devices and structures of the directory, structures of the file system, and formats of the data. It gives a representation of the shared physical resources which is based on the memory. A handle is returned by the I/O manager to a file object when there is a file that is opened and the one that manages the object will consider the file objects as one of the other objects until it is used. The object manager will then call the manager of the I/O devices to receive some assistance in accessing one of the devices.
The file management system of Windows supports filenames that are long which can have spaces and special characters. The NTFS provides techniques in saving disk space, it does not perform disk allocation to that part of the file when the file is partially empty or has no data. It also compresses data for file that are non-sparse by utilizing clusters that are in virtual in a file. It gives robustness to the system by making sure that metadata will be consistent even if a crash will happen.
It also performs recovery when the metadata is changed by the redo entries. Data in the files may be deleted if the disk blocks are being damaged due to a crash. To tolerate this faults, RAID technology is utilized by the driver. There are new ways in recovery for Windows such as the transaction manager of the kernel and the backup and recovery center.
