File system managing all files and folders, as well as the information needed to placed and access this data and this file system used in windows Vista is called NTFS. NTFS hard drive is divided into many sectors, the first one is boot sector. It is used to saves the information about the file system structure and the layout of the disk, and also contains the boot code in Windows Operating system.
Every partition is the Master File table, which is one of the databases that contain all information essential to placed and retrieving files from the hard disk. Each file is stored on your hard disk on more than one cluster of data with cluster size from 512 bytes to 64 kilo bytes. Large files are broken into multiple clusters when a file is stored on your hard disk, a record of that file and location of clusters is created in the Master File Table.
It also allows for on-the-fly data compression then implemented within the file system. Compression is determined by setting a special bit within the file header and it is stored in the data file attributes. The application only accesses the data in memory, which has already been decompressed. Speed of data access is just as fast as if the program were accessing a non compressed file.
