Common file systems explained
One page explainer on: FAT32, NTFS, exFAT, HFS, HFS+, APFS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system
Current System Defaults
| Format | Products |
|---|---|
| APFS | Apple products, since macOS High Sierra |
| NTFS | Windows products, since Windows XP |
| exFAT | SD cards, thumb drives, etc |
By Microsoft
| name | alias | release year | other info |
|---|---|---|---|
| FAT | File Allocation Table | 1977, floppy disks | proprietary |
| FAT32 | 1996, MS-DOS 7.1 | proprietary; variant of FAT. Has the sometimes-still-encountered 4GB max file size. 32 as in 32-bit field for the sector count | |
| NTFS | NT File System | 1993 | proprietary; NT as in "Windows NT", meant "New Technology", see this |
| exFAT | Extensible FAT | 2006 | optimized for flash memory; no longer proprietary since 2019 |
For FAT: Linux and BSD have open-source drivers (read & write), macOS comes with read-only driver
By Apple
| name | alias | release year | other info |
|---|---|---|---|
| HFS | Hierarchical File System | 1985 | proprietary |
| Mac OS Extended | HFS Plus, HFS+ | 1998, macOS 8.1 | proprietary |
| APFS | Apple File System | 2017, macOS High Sierra | proprietary |
Linux
| name | alias | release year | other info |
|---|---|---|---|
| EXT3 | Third Extended File System | 2001, Linux 2.4.15 | Journaling; max file system size: 32TB |
| EXT4 | Fourth Extended File System | 2006, Linux 2.6.19 | Journaling; max file system size: 1 exabyte; backward compatible with EXT3, EXT2 |
| XFS | 1994 | developed by Silicon Graphics, now maintained by Red Hat | |
| Btrfs | B-tree File System, Better FS, Butter FS | 2009 | copy-on-write (CoW); certain features still maturing for production environments |
| ZFS | Zettabyte File System | 2005, OpenSolaris | both the volume manager and the file system; built-in RAID-like functionality (RAID-Z) |