NTFS is a journaling file system, which means that before an actual change is made to the data, it is first logged in a “journal” so that if something happens in the middle of writing data, the system can recover quickly and not need to be repaired.

So if you want to format your 5 TB external hard drive as a single volume with FAT32, you wouldn’t be able to do it.įiles stored on FAT32 file systems also have a much higher chance of being corrupted as opposed to NTFS. FAT32 can only work with files up to 4G in size and volumes up to 2TB in size. In terms of security, you can also encrypt files using the built-in encryption in Windows.Īnother major benefit of switching to NTFS is that you are no longer restricted to storing files less than 4GB in size on the device.

For example, an NTFS file system lets you add Allow and Deny permissions to individual files and folders for specific Windows users, something you cannot do in the FAT file system. The advantages of enabling NTFS on removable storage devices are fairly enticing.

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