In my opinion, a file system is a file management tool that deals with kinds of files with different file formats on a machine. But I fail to gid deep about this thing. Can anyone explain to me what a computer file system is in simple and readable words?
Moreover, are there any differences in the file system between a Mac computer and a Windows computer?
Hi there. In computing, a file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to FS or fs) governs file organization and access. A local file system is a capability of an operating system that services the applications running on the same computer. A distributed file system is a protocol providing access between networked computers.
A file system provides a data storage service that allows applications to share mass storage. Without a file system, applications could access the storage in incompatible ways, leading to resource contention, data corruption, and data loss.
Many file system designs and implementations have various structures and features and various resulting characteristics such as speed, flexibility, security, size, and more.
Files systems have been developed for many types of storage devices, including hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs), magnetic tapes, and optical discs.
A portion of the computer’s main memory can be set up as a RAM disk that serves as a storage device for a file system. File systems such as tmpfs can store files in virtual memory.
A virtual file system provides access to files that are either computed on request, called virtual files (see procfs and sysfs), or are mapping into another, backing storage.
File systems limit storable data capacity – generally driven by the typical size of storage devices at the time the file system is designed and anticipated into the foreseeable future.
Since storage sizes have increased at a near-exponential rate (see Moore’s law), newer storage devices often exceed existing file system limits within only a few years after introduction. This requires new file systems with ever-increasing capacity.
With higher capacity, the need for capabilities and therefore complexity increases as well. File system complexity typically varies proportionally with available storage capacity. Capacity issues aside, the file systems of early 1980s home computers with 50 KB to 512 KB of storage would not be a reasonable choice for modern storage systems with hundreds of gigabytes of capacity. Likewise, modern file systems would not be a reasonable choice for these early systems, since the complexity of modern file system structures would quickly consume the limited capacity of early storage systems.
You can regard the computer file system as a file management utility that manages and indexes the stored files in a specially designed way, and this way varies based on the operating system. Every operating system delivers its file systems with configured features and highlights.
For Mac, it has delivered HFS, HFS +, and APFS. While for Windows, its current file systems include FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS. Mac’s file system is rarely used on Windows, yet Windows’s exFAT and FAT32 are writable and readable on Mac machines. NTFS only opens its read permission on a Mac machine, if you want to write an NTFS hard drive on a Mac, an NTFS for Mac utility like Download iBoysoft NTFS for Mac is recommended here, which mounts your NTFS hard drive in read-and-write mode once the drive is connected to a Mac machine.
As for the differences, you can have a basic overview here:
A brief introduction to APFS:
High Sierra 10.13 back in September 2017. Since then, it has been the default file system for macOS.
It is specifically designed for the latest flash/SSD storage types. However, it still works with older hard drives as well. The APFS offers multiple formats, such as APFS, Encrypted, Case-sensitive, and Encrypted Case-sensitive.
APFS includes some noticeable features for data security, overall efficiency, and speed. Below are the key advantages and disadvantages of the APFS you should know.
A brief introduction to HFS +
HFS Plus or HFS+ (also known as Mac OS Extended or HFS Extended) is a journaling file system developed by Apple Inc. It replaced the Hierarchical File System (HFS) as the primary file system of Apple computers with the 1998 release of Mac OS 8.1. HFS+ continued as the primary Mac OS X file system until it was itself replaced with the Apple File System (APFS), released with macOS High Sierra in 2017. HFS+ is also one of the formats supported by the iPod digital music player.
Compared to its predecessor HFS, also called Mac OS Standard or HFS Standard, HFS Plus supports much larger files (block addresses are 32-bit length instead of 16-bit) and using Unicode (instead of Mac OS Roman or any of several other character sets) for naming items. Like HFS, HFS Plus uses B-trees to store most volume metadata, but unlike most file systems that support hard links, HFS Plus supports hard links to directories. HFS Plus permits filenames up to 255 characters in length, and n-forked files similar to NTFS, though until 2005 almost no system software took advantage of forks other than the data fork and resource fork. HFS Plus also uses a full 32-bit allocation mapping table rather than HFS’s 16-bit, improving the use of space on large disks.
A brief introduction to HFS
Hierarchical File System (HFS) is a proprietary file system developed by Apple Inc. for use in computer systems running Mac OS. Originally designed for use on floppy and hard disks, it can also be found on read-only media such as CD-ROMs. HFS is also referred to as Mac OS Standard (or HFS Standard), while its successor, HFS Plus, is also called Mac OS Extended (or HFS Extended).
With the introduction of Mac OS X 10.6, Apple dropped support for formatting or writing HFS disks and images, which remained supported as read-only volumes until macOS 10.15.[1] Starting with macOS 10.15, HFS disks can no longer be read.
A brief introduction to exTAF
exFAT (Extensible File Allocation Table) is a file system introduced by Microsoft in 2006 and optimized for flash memory such as USB flash drives and SD cards. exFAT was proprietary until 28 August 2019, when Microsoft published its specification. Microsoft owns patents on several elements of its design.
exFAT can be used where NTFS is not a feasible solution (due to data-structure overhead), but where a greater file-size limit than that of the standard FAT32 file system (i.e. 4 GB) is required.
exFAT has been adopted by the SD Association as the default file system for SDXC and SDUC cards larger than 32 GB.
Windows 8 and later versions natively support exFAT boot, and support the installation of the system in a special way to run in the exFAT volume.
A brief introduction to FAT32
In order to overcome the volume size limit of FAT16, while at the same time allowing DOS real-mode code to handle the format, Microsoft designed a new version of the file system, FAT32, which supported an increased number of possible clusters, but could reuse most of the existing code, so that the conventional memory footprint was increased by less than 5 KB under DOS. Cluster values are represented by 32-bit numbers, of which 28 bits are used to hold the cluster number.
The FAT32 boot sector uses a 32-bit field for the sector count, limiting the maximal FAT32 volume size to 2 terabytes with a sector size of 512 bytes. The maximum FAT32 volume size is 16 TB with a sector size of 4,096 bytes. The built-in Windows shell disk format tool on Windows NT arbitrarily only supports volume sizes up to 32 GB, but Windows supports reading and writing to preexisting larger FAT32 volumes, and these can be created with the command prompt, PowerShell, or third-party tools, or by formatting the volume on a non-Windows system or on a Windows 9x system with FAT32 support and then transferring it to the Windows NT system. After 30 years Microsoft increase FAT32 32 GB to 2 TB.
A brief introduction to NTFS:
NTFS is a journaling file system developed by Microsoft. It was introduced in 1993 with Windows NT 3.1, and now it is the default file system of the Windows NT family, superseding the Files Allocation Table (FAT), which had several limitations. These limitations include limited single files and partition size with no data protection in the case of a power failure.
In comparison to its predecessor, NTFS resolves these limitations. On top of this, it also offers numerous advantages according to modern-day needs