NTFS, New Technology File System

The purpose of NTFS is to store and retrieve files on a computer. Each partition of an operating system keeps track of files that have been stored. Files may be stored on the disk in one or more clusters of a predetermined size. By using NTFS, sizes of the clusters vary from 512 bytes to 64 kilobytes. The Windows NT operating system recommends a standard size for the both the cluster and the disk. Determining the cluster size optimizes efficiency of disk use against the number of requests to the disk it takes to access a file. When using NTFS, the cluster size will be larger by default as result of a larger disk. This is because the system will assume that a user wishes to enhance performance at the expense of saving space on the disk. When NTFS creates a file, details about that file is created in a special folder called the Master File Table. This record is used to locate probable clusters of that file. NTFS continuously attempts to find reasonable space that will store an entire file and every one of its clusters.