NTFS - Versions

Versions

The NTFS on-disk format has five released versions:

• v1.0 with NT 3.1, released mid-1993
• v1.1 with NT 3.5, released fall 1994
• v1.2 with NT 3.51 (mid-1995) and NT 4 (mid-1996) (occasionally referred to as "NTFS 4.0", because file system driver version is 4.0)
• v3.0 from Windows 2000 ("NTFS V5.0" or "NTFS5")
• v3.1 from Windows XP (autumn 2001; "NTFS V5.1")

V1.0 and V1.1 (and newer) are incompatible: that is, volumes written by NT 3.5x cannot be read by NT 3.1 until an update on the NT 3.5x CD is applied to NT 3.1, which also adds FAT long file name support. Below are descriptions of some of the versions:

• V1.2 supports compressed files, named streams, ACL-based security, etc.
• V3.0 added disk quotas, encryption, sparse files, reparse points, update sequence number (USN) journaling, the $Extend folder and its files, and reorganized security descriptors so that multiple files using the same security setting can share the same descriptor.
• V3.1 expanded the Master File Table (MFT) entries with redundant MFT record number (useful for recovering damaged MFT files).

Windows Vista introduced Transactional NTFS, NTFS symbolic links, partition shrinking and self-healing functionality, though these features owe more to additional functionality of the operating system than the file system itself.

The NTFS.sys version (i.e. NTFS v5.0 introduced with Windows 2000) should not be confused with the on-disk NTFS format version (v3.1 since Windows XP). The NTFS v3.1 on-disk format is unchanged from the introduction of Windows XP and is used in Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7. The confusion arises when no differentiation is made when features are implemented into the NTFS.sys driver within the Windows OS rather than in the NTFS on-disk format. An incident of this was when Microsoft detailed new features within NTFS in Windows 2000 and they called it NTFS v5.0, yet it is the NTFS.sys driver that is at that version and the on-disk format is only at v3.0.