SSD NTFS: Everything you need to know

by Paul | Last Updated: August 9, 2022

You probably know someone that is always misplacing things, because I do personally. It can be their key in the morning, they leave their clothes everywhere. Imagine your computer was that forgetful and you never find where you put stuff like important papers, task documents or your OS, fortunately, all computers use some kind of file system to track where all your stuff.

What is SSD NTFS?

The most popular windows file system is the New Technology file system or NTFS. It was introduced to overcome the limitation FAT32 and has a file size limit of 16EB meaning there is no file size constraint.

Today, there are a lot of file systems in use. File systems divide the storage space of a drive into visual compartments known as clusters and maintain an index where NTFS will be used

There are many different kinds of systems out there, but what they have in common, is they divide up your hard drive, SSD, or flash drive into small units, that store data and some kind of way of remembering what data is in each unit so it can go and find it later on.

To better understand how NTFS works and to figure out what system to use for your files. I will talk about the features of NT file systems

It was developed for Windows NT 3.1. it is the default file system of the Windows NT family

NTFS is a journaling file system which means a maintains a record of changes, so it can recover data following a system crash or power failure.

NTFS also supports file permissions. It allows the file to be flagged with read-only, as well encryption and other features which makes NTFS the best suitable for use on a system drive

All modern forms of Windows must be installed on a drive that is NTFS formatted. The only real downside of NTFS is the lack of compatibility with older versions of windows and non- Windows OS.

For example, by default NTFS volumes are read-only and macOS and older Linux distros. It might not be readable at all on other devices such as stand-alone media

Why you should use NTFS

When you store a file on disk you need to know where the file is physically located. It needs to have a way to associate a file name to that file content, plus there might be other things like file name and file permission.

NTFS uses some space management tricks to make it use space much efficiently than other file systems like FAT in better real-world capacities in many cases and can support massive partitions of hundreds of terabytes.

It can as well support huge individual file sizes, important in the age of 4K videos that can span multiple hours making them massive

It also features to help prevent data loss in the event of a crash, native file, compression, and security features including native file encryption support to keep out unauthorized uses.

These features have made NTFS an almost universal choice for Windows-based PC these days.

This structure of how the raw data is organized on the disk is called a file system. You create a file system when format a drive which in Linus system is makefilesystem or mkfs to format and makefilesystem are synonymous in this context.

Pros

• Native to windows, because windows were built on NT
• There is a file size limit
• There is a partition size limit

Cons

• macOS can read it but can not write to it.
• You have limited compatibility across operating systems

Formatting SSD to NTFS

When a hard drive, USB, flash drive, or SD card comes raw, you would not be able to access it at all. Raw partitions are not recognized by the windows file system and as a result, you can not read the data from the hard drive non can you write any new data to it.

In this situation, the most effective to get your SSD back to normal is to convert it from raw to an NTFS. Once your SSD is converted to NTFS you will be able to form a read and write operations to it.

After installing a drive into one of our enclosures or drive docks, connect the device into the computer’s USB or compatible port and windows will not prompt to format a blank drive when connected.

Right-click on the Start Menu and select disk management from the list. If this is a new blank drive, the system will prompt to initialize the disk, the default partition style is recommended, select ok, to initialize the drive.

The drive currently has no partitions, right-click on the allocated section and select the new simple volume to start the partitioning and formatting wizard.

Follow the on-screen to create a partition. For example, you can create a full partition of the full size of the drive, next you select the formatting option. In this case NTFS and we can name it external drive to make identifying the drive easier.

By default, you should perform a quick format to check, if not check the option. Finally, we complete the partitioning and formatting wizard, Windows will format the drive and it should be available in a few seconds in an SSD.

 Conclusion

Think of a reference book or a textbook you have many options in how the information is going to be displayed, organized, printed in that book. The type can be large or small, the chapters can be long or short, they can be a table of context, there could be an index, there could be footnotes.

The footnotes could be at the bottom of every page or they could be collected at the end. They could also be references at the end or on each page. There is a lot of ways of organizing, what is essentially the same information.

NTFS might be something along the lines of a book that has it all, the table of content, the complete index, the footnotes, the references, everything you may want in a file system or a book is in NTFS.