It may seem like a trivial matter, but your file system has a lot to do with both the security and the performance of your computer. The FAT and FAT32 file systems, which your computer may be running now if you have upgraded from Windows™ 9x, Me, or if you installed your system and selected one of these file systems instead of NTFS, is very fast for most purposes, but has its disadvantages, is unreliable, and very insecure.

Unlike FAT/FAT32, NTFS is based on the OS/2 HPFS or "High Performance File System" but with security (and in Windows™ 2000 and higher, quotas and encryption) extensions added in. It supports the ISO character sets & double-byte languages such as Chinese and Japanese, and thus the ability to name files with many different languages and different characters. It uses a database type structure for file storage, and uses space on your drive much more efficiently.

Properties for my C: drive

NTFS natively supports compression. This compression is on a per-file basis, not the entire drive. Therefore the safety of this compression leaves the old Stacker® and DriveSpace™ compression systems in the dust. These older systems actually created a file on your hard drive and stored everything within this file. This system of file storage is inherently dangerous, as one bad sector within this file could trash your entire drive. It also provided unreliable free space estimates.

In Pro versions of Windows™, targeted to Business, NTFS also supports Encryption. This encryption is linked to your user ID on the computer, and caveat emptor, if you for some reason forget your password and have to get it changed, you could lose access to every file you have encrypted. I advise using another system such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) instead, as this format isn't tied to your windows user ID. Microsoft decided that home users didn't really need this feature and elected to delete it from Windows XP Home. At the writing of this article, I'm not aware of whether they deleted this feature from the Media Center edition of XP or not.

NTFS also makes more efficient use of your disk space available. It uses 512-byte sectors and as small as 4-kilobyte clusters on a 80Gb drive. By comparison, FAT32 could be using cluser sizes as large as 16-kilobytes on such a drive. This may not seem like a big deal with drives as large as they are now, but keep in mind, even a 1-character file will take up 16K of space. This adds up quickly if you use a web browser.

Perhaps the most important feature was added in Windows™ 2000... Journaling. This feature means that Windows keeps a record of the changes that are going to take place, or have taken place, so that should there be a power loss, or system crash in the middle of the process, the journal can be replayed and corrective measures taken at the next boot, thus preventing the file system from becoming corrupted, as was common with older systems.

To check what file system your computer is currently using, open My Computer, Right-Click the drive and select Properties. You should see a window indicating the Totals of used and free space on the drive, a graph showing the usage, and an item titled File system which indicates the current file system on the drive.

Conversion to NTFS couldn't be simpler. You open a Command Prompt window and type "convert <Drive Letter> /fs:ntfs" (in the example to the left, the drive being converted is the C: drive.) I also recommend adding the /NoSecurity switch to the convert command. This will prevent any unfortunate surprises for those used to dealing with the security-free FAT/FAT32 file systems. If you're running Windows 2000 or XP Professional you can easily go back later and change the security for directories and files. For XP Home, this requires use of a cryptic command-line based utility, so I recommend leaving well enough alone under this operating system unless you really need to set file security.

I do recommend doing a Disk Cleanup and a full disk defragmentation when you have finished the conversion. Disk Cleanup will now give another checkbox called Compress Old Files which will compress any file that hasn't been accessed in a long time. In 99.999% of cases, this results in more free space on your hard drive and virtually no performance decrease as the files you compress weren't files you were using anyway. We will get into how to take advantage of these new security benefits in later articles.

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