Understanding filesystems

A hard drive can have multiple partitions on it, and, in each partition, there will be (in most cases) a filesystem. There might be hundreds of thousands to millions of files within a partition. The filesystem tracks where every file is and how much space is available within the partition boundaries.

We discussed sectors earlier in the Hard drives section; they are the smallest units available to store data. The filesystem stores data based on clusters. Clusters are comprised of one or more sectors. A cluster is the smallest allocation unit the filesystem can write to. There are many filesystems available, and some are restricted to specific operating systems unless the user enables drivers that will allow the operating system to read the filesystem.

We will now look at some of the common filesystems you may encounter.

The FAT filesystem

The File Allocation Table (FAT) filesystem has been around since the early days of home computing, and...