Hands on: NTFS revisited

Make the most of your hard drive with NTFS

We’ve dealt with the pros and cons of the NTFS file system compared with Fat32 in the past: to recap, NTFS wins all round. It can deal with larger disks, larger files and is more robust.

Although it has been around since 1993, it was only implemented in Windows NT and 2000: users of 95, 98 and ME were stuck with Fat and Fat32. Windows XP reunited the ‘pros’ with the ‘consumers’, with NTFS as an option in both Pro and Home versions.

Apart from supporting bigger disks (256TB) and bigger files (16TB), NTFS offers metadata and journalling. The first lets you see more information about your files; for example, the shutter speed and aperture setting of a digital photo. The second keeps a record of changes to the file system before the changes are made.

So if, for instance, there’s a power failure in the middle of a disk write, it becomes much easier for the operating system to sort this out on rebooting. For the user, this means the reprimand and detention following an ‘improper shutdown’ in Windows ME and 98 are things of the past.

NTFS brings with it three extras: compression, quotas and encryption. The first lets you save disk space by compressing files and folders. System-wide file compression is nothing new: MS-Dos 6.2 came with Drivespace, and this was pre-dated by Stac Electronics Stacker in 1991.

Unlike those utilities, however, NTFS compression can be used with individual files and folders as well as a drive. Although the techniques are similar, this is not the same as creating compressed (Zip) folders.

Compressed files and folders should have their names in blue. Check this option is enabled in Folder Options, View. Certain files and folders are compressed by default. In your Windows folder, all the hotfix uninstall folders will be in blue, with names such as $NtUninstallKB925486$.

You can compress files and folders by right-clicking on them, selecting Properties and clicking the Advanced button on the General tab. A new dialogue will have an option to compress the contents. If you’re working on a folder and you click OK, then OK or Apply from Properties, you’ll be asked to confirm whether or not you want all the subfolders and their files compressed.

Although compression and decompression are completely transparent, there is a school of thought that compression slows down your PC, as the processor has to decompress files each time they’re opened. A rival opinion maintains the opposite, as the bottleneck lies not in the processor but in the disk controller, and with fewer bytes to read, files open more quickly.

Some files, such as text files and Word Doc files (famously described by a Microsoft spokesperson as being “mostly air”) compress well. Others, such asJpg and Gif images, mp3 or other sound files, video files and the new Office 2007 XML format are already compressed. And it is these files that are likely to be taking up the most space on the average PC.

Status quota
Quotas let a system administrator limit the amount of disk space that users’ files can occupy. Although this can be a useful way to restrict the amount of disk space that children can use on the family PC, for example, it isn’t very versatile. Quota restrictions only apply to limited accounts and are set on a per-volume basis, so you can assign different quotas to different partitions.

Quotas are also based on uncompressed file size, so there is no incentive to compress files or folders, and as quotas are based on volumes, it doesn’t matter in which folder the user saves a file – so saving in Shared Documents counts the same as in My Documents, assuming these are on the same partition.

To assign quotas you need to be logged on with administrator status. Right-click on a drive letter, select Properties and turn to the Quotas tab. First you need to enable quota management from the first checkbox. Next you can choose whether or not to deny disk space to users who exceed the limit.

If you do this, and a user tries to save or copy a file that would push them over the limit, they’ll either get an ‘Insufficient disk space’ message from Windows, or an error message from an application stating that it could not save the file. Next you have options for limiting disk usage. If you select the ‘Do not limit disk usage’ option, this will enable you to view disk usage on a per-user basis.

You then set the two limits – one for an overall limit and one for a warning threshold – and check the boxes for logging events. Once you’ve pressed OK or Apply, you’ll be able to see the log by pressing the Quota Entries button. This log contains no time or date fields, but you can retrieve this information from the Event Viewer if you look for entries with ‘ntfs’ as the source. Also, here it is possible to change an individual user’s quota by right-clicking on a log item for that user.

Encryption is only available in XP Pro, and like compression is completely transparent to the user. Although you might have a password-protected user account, someone with physical access to your PC – a thief, for example – could bypass this by installing a different operating system or putting the hard disk in another computer. Encryption scrambles the actual files, so even if thieves manage to get access, they will only see gobbledegook.

There are a number of caveats to encryption which mean it is essential to back up your encryption certificate – should this or your user account be damaged or changed you won’t be able to access the encrypted files. We’ll look at encryption in detail next month.

Master class
In January I described how to add a hard disk to your PC. I mentioned that when using the ‘cable select’ position on the drive’s jumpers, the drive connector nearer the motherboard on the cable became the slave and the end one the master. I also mentioned using Acronis Migrate Easy to transfer the contents of the old disk to the new, and stated that “It really couldn’t be easier”.

I obviously didn’t read the Acronis manual all the way through, but eagle-eyed reader Mike Hepworth did, where, he noted, it states the opposite – the nearer connector becomes the master. Well, I have the two traditional excuses. First, I’m a software guy, not hardware. Second, it worked for me – and has also done so with other PCs.

So who is right? It turns out that the situation is rather complicated. A hard disk jumpered for cable select works according to the state of pin number 28. If this is grounded (earthed in British English), then the drive is the master. If it is open-circuit, that is not connected, it becomes the slave. Older standard 40-conductor IDE cables did not support cable select, though they could be modified by cutting the pin 28 conductor between the two drive connectors – hence the intermediate connector became the master.

More recent IDE connectors have 80 conductors, although the connectors themselves only have 40 (or more usually 39) pins. The extra conductors are all grounded and interspersed with the connected ones to decrease cross-talk between the data conductors. And the end connector, not the intermediate one, has pin 28 grounded, so the disk connected to this will be the master. The terms master and slave are misleading. Neither drive controls the other, but the so-called master becomes drive 0 on the IDE channel, and the slave, drive 1.

Department of shifty tips
If you hold down the Shift key while opening a folder in thumbnail view, or switching to thumbnail view, the filenames won’t be shown (XP only). If you hold down the Shift key when clicking on a link in Internet Explorer, it will open in a new page. Shift & Delete sends a file or folder straight to oblivion, bypassing the Recycle Bin.