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CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide

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SSDs, once data was written into a memory cell, it stayed there until the drive

was full. Even if the cell contained file contents from a “deleted” file, the cell

was not immediately erased or overwritten, because the SSD controller had

no way to know the cell’s contents were deleted as far as the OS was

concerned.

Because SSD memory cells have a finite number of times that they can be

written to before wearing out, the first generation of SSDs waited until all the

cells of an SSD were filled before erasing and reusing a previously written

cell.

Modern SSDs have a feature called trim that enables the OS to issue

commands to clean up and reuse deleted areas. This happens automatically,

so there’s no reason at all to defragment any SSD.

NTFS

The Windows format of choice these days is the New Technology File System

(NTFS). NTFS came out a long time ago with the first version of Windows

NT, thus the name. Over the years, NTFS has undergone several

improvements. NTFS uses clusters of blocks and file allocation tables, but in

a much more complex and powerful way compared to FAT32. NTFS offers

six major improvements and refinements: redundancy, security, compression,

encryption, disk quotas, and cluster sizing.

TIP If you have a geeky interest in what version of NTFS you are running,

open a Command Prompt as an administrator and type this command: fsutil

fsinfo ntfsinfo c:. Then press ENTER.

NTFS Structure

NTFS utilizes an enhanced file allocation table called the master file table

(MFT). An NTFS partition keeps a backup copy of the most critical parts of

the MFT in the middle of the disk, reducing the chance that a serious drive

error can wipe out both the MFT and the MFT copy. Whenever you

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