Aomei Partition Assistant 2.0 Is Being Developed

The professional partition management software developed by Aomei Technology Co., Ltd. has released on Feb-01-2010 and until now many new and old customers have used it & feedback very good remarks. Some sent emails with partition related questions which made our customer support team very busy all weekdays. Per some friendly clients’ suggestion, we have launched the official blog on April 10th, 2010, a special venue for discussing partition management, computer optimization and other IT technology related tricks.

Meanwhile, with the more and more suggestions pouring into Aomei R&D team for improving software functions, we are working on the Partition Assistant v2.0 which expected to release May-01-2010. It is a much more advanced solution for partition management which marked significant upgrades from the v1.0, with powerful abilities including: to resize/move/extend/shrink a partition, to create/delete/format a partition and to extend the system partition (especially for the system drive, solving the "low disk space" problem).

The core features can RESIZE volume without reformatting data. In additional, it can set ACTIVE partition, hide and unhide partition, set Drive Letter for partition, set Label as well as wipe the deleted data to make it unrecoverable. It also has the comprehensive function to diagnose the bad sectors. The Extend Partition Works well under Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Windows 7 and Windows server 2000/2003/2008, including both 32 bit and 64 bit systems -- and supporting hard drive, external USB pen drive and RAID.

At present, the new version is in testing period and some beta versions has been sent to VIP customers for testing purpose. Let’s expect and await for the official release which will even better benefit users who need to well manage their HDD partition or optimize the computer system. Please see http://www.extend-partition.com/news/index.html for more information.

  

How to support exFAT file system in Windows XP

Microsoft has released an update for Windows XP SP2 and SP3 system that adds exFAT file system drivers to the operating system. The exFAT file system is the successor to the FAT32 file system which comes with several advantages but also a few disadvantages in comparison to both the FAT32 and NTFS system. It was mainly designed to address the growing needs of mobile personal storage on different operating systems. The exFAT file system was initially released with Windows CE 6.0 and added to Windows Vista with the release of Service Pack 1.

The main advantages of exFAT in comparison to FAT32 are the removal of the 4 GB file size limit and support for hard drives with large capacities (recommended maximum sizes for both are 512 TB). The exFAT file system driver will add the option to format removable media with the exFAT file system to take advantage of it. The file system is using a smaller disk space overhead than the NTFS file system. Users reported a disk space overhead of only 96 Kilobytes on a 4 Gigabyte flash drive after formattting it with the exFAT file system. The NTFS file system used more than 47 Megabytes of space for overhead.

Interested users can download the exFAT file system driver update directly from Microsoft (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955704) to add exFAT file system support to their operating system.

The prerequisites for the update are an installation of Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Service Pack 3.

Article Source:   http://www.ghacks.net/2009/01/29/windows-xp-exfat-file-system-driver/

   

exFAT File System Advantages

Extended file allocation table (exFAT) is a new file system that is better adapted to the growing needs of mobile personal storage. The exFAT file system not only handles large files, such as those used for media storage, it enables seamless interoperability between desktop PCs and devices such as portable media devices so that files can easily be copied between desktop and device. In addition, exFAT can be adopted with minimal effort.

The exFAT system offers the following advantages:

• Enables the file system to handle growing capacities in media, increasing capacity to 32 GB and larger.
• Handles more than 1000 files in a single directory.
• Speeds up storage allocation processes.
• Removes the previous file size limit of 4 GB.
• Supports interoperability with future desktop OSs.
• Provides an extensible format, including OEM-definable parameters to customize the file system for specific device characteristics.

In addition, you can choose to add transaction support to your exFAT implementation (TexFAT) to ensure transaction-safe operations. As of Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and later, TexFAT can only be supported in an exFAT environment.

Article Source: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa914353.aspx

 

  

Additional NTFS Features than FAT

In addition to supporting larger volumes than FAT, NTFS contains other features that make it better for corporate operations:

• Reliability - A drawback to using FAT is that if a computer goes down, it can be difficult to repair the file system. To make speed recovery, NTFS maintains a log of every transaction that affects the file system. These actions are logged before they are performed. Then, when there is a problem, any incomplete transactions can be completed or changes can be rolled back.
• Mount Points - All Windows versions assign a different drive letter to each partition or volume on a disk, which limits the number of accessible volumes to the 26 letters of the alphabet. Mount Points let the administrator attach other partitions to an empty directory within an already mounted NTFS volume. Rather than being limited to NTFS volumes, these additional volumes can also be using FAT16, FAT32, CDFS or UDF which expands the functionality of this feature.
• Access Control - The Security Descriptor function provides hierarchal access control for each file or directory in an NTFS volume. It is important to understand that the security features built into Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7 only work with NTFS. If you use FAT, you lose all security functionality and place the organization at risk.
• Disk Quotas - NTFS permits assigning of storage quotas on a per-user basis. It does this by tracking the Security ID (SID) of anyone who creates a file or directory. When the limit is exceeded, the system sends a "Disk Full" error report and logs it in the Event Log.
• Encryption - When the computer is running Windows 2000, NTFS includes Microsoft's Encrypting File System (EFS) which automatically encrypts and decrypts files without user intervention. This is particularly useful for remote users, since laptops are frequently lost or stolen and one can't rely on users to remember to encrypt their files.

These and other features are not available with FAT.

Article Source: http://www.auerbach-publications.com/dynamic_data/2770_1640_Windows%20File%20Systems.htm


Related Articles:
You can convert file system from FAT to NTFS without data loss by using Partition Assistant.

 

Most common Windows file systems

Along the way the company has also been upgrading its file systems to add additional features, reliability and security needed for corporate users. In this article we look at the various types of file systems now supported by Windows.

Windows Disk Systems supports two file systems for magnetic disks – FAT and NTFS. NTFS (short for NT File System) is the preferred system for Windows NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7 and .NET server and workstation operating systems, but these O/Ses still support the older FAT (File Allocation Table) file system for use with floppy disks and with older versions of Windows in multi boot systems. To take full advantage of the security, disk quota and other features of the later software, however, you will need to be using NTFS.

FAT
FAT started being used with DOS and there are now three different versions of the File Allocation Table file system - FAT12, FAT16 and FAT 32. The numbers used in these versions designate the number of bits used to identify a cluster.

FAT12:
The earliest version the file system, FAT12 allows a partition to contain up to 4096 (212) clusters. Since it supports clusters of one to sixteen sectors, the maximum partition size is 32MB. Windows 2000 uses FAT12 for floppy disks and for partitions of 16MB or smaller.

FAT16:
FAT16 provides a sixteen-fold expansion in the number of clusters it identifies, supporting volumes containing 65,536 (216) clusters. It also expands the maximum cluster size to 128 sectors (64KB) and maximum volume size to 4GB.

FAT32:
To address the need for even larger storage capacity, Microsoft introduced FAT32 with Windows 95 OSR2. Following the pattern of the earlier versions of the file system, it uses 32 bits to designate a cluster. However the last four bits are reserved. Each volume, therefore, can contain up to nearly 270 million (228) clusters which theoretically translates into a 8 Terabyte volume comprised of 32KB clusters. In practice, however, while Windows 2000 will manage larger volumes created in other operating systems, it limits the size of new FAT32 volumes to 32GB since the file system becomes quite inefficient beyond that size. If you do want to create a larger volume, you can dual boot the system into either Windows 95 or 98, establish the volume using that OS, and then manage the volume using Windows 2000.


NTFS
While each of the FAT versions represents an incremental improvement over its predecessor, NTFS takes a completely different approach to the way that data is organized. It grew out of Microsoft's desire to increase its share of the corporate marketplace. FAT was a very simple system which worked for PCs, but it lacked the management and security features needed to compete with UNIX in a high-end, networked environment. The first attempt at a newer file system was the High Performance File System (HPFS) introduced with OS/2 Version 1.2. When the IBM/Microsoft partnership that created OS/2 fell apart, and Microsoft decided to create Windows NT, it incorporated some of the features of HPFS into its New Technology File System (NTFS).

NTFS is the native file system for Windows NT 4.0, 2000 and XP operating systems. While these O/Ses can operate with FAT, many of their features only work with NTFS, so NTFS should be used whenever possible. Fortunately, if you have one or more FAT partitions running on one of these operating systems, it is a simple matter to convert them to NTFS without losing any data.

NTFS, a log-based file system, addresses FAT's reliability and recoverability problems. A partition's clusters are numbered sequentially using a 64-bit logical cluster number (LCN). Theoretically this system would allow access to 16 exabytes (16 billion GB) which far exceeds current storage needs. For now, Windows 2000 limits volumes to 128 Terabytes, but later operating systems could take advantage of even larger storage capacities. Like FAT, it sets a default cluster size depending on the size of the partition, assigning a size of 4KB for anything over 2GB. Also like FAT, administrators can override the defaults and use drop-down box to specify sizes up to 64KB.

Article Source: http://www.auerbach-publications.com/dynamic_data/2770_1640_Windows%20File%20Systems.htm


Related Articles:
You can convert file system from FAT to NTFS without data loss by using Partition Assistant.