![]() But, it’s easier if I don’t have to worry about what software is on what workstation. And I do this when I have open-source options available or budget to buy licenses. You can install software to add additional file system compatibility. Because, if my digitization vendor uses Windows workstations and I use Macs, the hard drive we shuttle data with must be compatible with both. A common need is cross-platform compatibility. That’s just another example of needing to maintain an array of options to access data from the harried years of the 80s and 90s.įor those of us writing data to storage devices, we need to choose file systems that meet the needs of our computing environment. Why does this matter?įor those of us that work with old storage media, identifying a file system and having a computer with the appropriate software to read it is important. Linux can work with nearly everything, if someone released software to do it and you installed it. macOS can read from an NTFS-formatted device, but it can’t write to it. Supporting others’ file systems is not guaranteed. Every OS will best support in-house developed file systems. ![]() Take note of the relationship between operating systems and file systems. In Linux, there is ext2 (1993), ext3 (2001), ext4 (2008), and btrfs (still in development). The implementation of these features could be commercially advantageous and vendors created their own file systems to best interact with their systems.Īpple has used HFS (1986), HFS+ (1998), and APFS (2017). ![]() They can have features like journaling, data integrity checks, on-the-fly compression, and storing metadata about the files. FAT12 was extended to deal with some of these issues, first to FAT16 (1984) and then to FAT32 (1996).īut file systems can do even more than just organize a storage device. On a device with 5 billion bytes of capacity, 11 characters for a file name is miserly, and 2 bytes isn’t enough for the sector positions. With that perspective 11 characters for the file name and 2 bytes for the sector position was fine. For example, a 5.25-inch floppy disk only held about 360 thousand bytes, so the designers didn’t want to consume too much space with the file system. What are other examples of file systems?Ī file system developed in 1977 will have the biases of a computing in 1977. If it can’t read those rules, your computer will be able to see the storage device but not the contents of it. The 20th and 21st byte specify which sector of the device the first chunk of the file is stored in.Īs long as your computer system knows those rules and can follow them, it can use a storage device formatted with that file system.The 13th byte of the row specifies whether the file requires a password to read, modify, or delete.The first 11 bytes of the row define the file or folder name, represented as (8 characters).(3 characters).Each folder is defined as its own table with a row for every file or folder that is a member of that folder.The File Allocation Table (FAT) file system, first published by Microsoft in 1977, is a good example to use for illustration. The rules that create the architecture are part of the file system. It finds out the sector of the device where the first part of that file is written.It checks to see if you have permission to open that file.It checks if there is a file in that folder named video.mov.The computer figures out where the Desktop folder is in the folder hierarchy.To better understand it, think about some of the things that happens when you open a file on your desktop named video.mov What is a file system?Ī file system is the way that data is structured on a storage device. And if you are also using a lot of portable drives, you should consider exFAT as well. All of them use the same file system, exFAT. They range in size from 500 GB solid state disks the size of a credit card to a 126 TB RAID 5 array with its own rollaway case. We use a lot of portable drives at the library. ExFAT: A File System for Your Portable Drives
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