The NTFS filesystem

NTFS or New Technology Filesystem is the default filesystem in Windows NT as a result of the storage capacity increasing and the need for a more secure, scalable, and advanced filesystem. NTFS overcame the FAT limitations and was more suitable for high storage capacity. In NTFS, everything is a file including the filesystem area itself, as we will see in the following section.

NTFS components

Like FAT and any other filesystem, NTFS has its components as follows:

The boot sector is the first sector in the partition, and it contains some information about the filesystem itself, such as start code, sector size, cluster size in sectors, and the number of reserved sectors. The filesystem area contains many files, including the MFT or Master File Table, which contains the metadata of the files and directories in the partition. It will be discussed later.

• The data area holds the actual contents of the files, and it is divided in clusters with a size determined during formatting...