Formatting Storage

Preparing a Device to Be Written To

Another thing that your operating system does is prepare the device to be written to. Now, some devices come already formatted and you don't need to do any kind of formatting on them. However, some devices you need to format in order to make them accessible to your operating system. What it's doing is setting up things like a file allocation table so that way it can utilize the disk.

Your storage device usually has some sort of table that's used as a reference to reference the different files on that drive, so that way there are different addresses and we can look up where that file exists. Now, it would kind of defeat the purpose of having this table spread all over the disk and different SPS parts of the disk, so really what we want to do is set aside some space on the disk where this table exists, so that way we can go to that and take a look at where our different files reside on the disk.

File System Types

The way the table is formed and how the information is stored inside these clusters varies a little bit. It varies depending on what kind of device you have, and it varies depending on what kind of operating system you have. So there are different file system types. One thing we've already mentioned is a file allocation table — well, that is one file system type, and there's been various different versions of this. But there are a lot of other file system types that are out there, and each one of these file systems has a little different approach in how they implement this technology.

For instance, NTFS, or new technology file system, is the file system that Microsoft Windows systems use, and so it has a master file table, or MFT, that it implements instead of a file allocation table. But essentially it has a lot of the same components as a file allocation table.

Viewing the Master File Table

We can see a little bit of info on the master file table by using one of our Sysinternals tools. So I'm going to open up Sysinternals and I'm going to scroll down to NTFSInfo64. NTFSInfo64 is right here, although this is a command line tool, so what I actually need to do is open up a command line — and it does require administration rights.

So what I'm going to do is click on the start, and I'm going to open up the command window here. But instead of just opening it up by hitting enter, I'm going to have to right-click and say run as administrator, and then I have escalated privileges so I can run things with escalated privileges.

Then what I want to do is get into the Sysinternals directory. So I'm going to get into the Sysinternals directory here by doing a change directory and then the path, and I'll hit enter. Now I'm in that path right there, and I'm going to do the NTFSInfo64 and hit enter. It does require some parameters here, and the one that is required is the drive letter. So I'm going to do the drive letter of C and hit enter, and it shows me information about the formatting of this device.

One of them is this master file table down here. This is the MFT info, and as we can see here, the MFT size is 199 bytes. We can see the cluster that it starts at and the range of clusters right there. So we get some information about the MFT info.

The ones that are outlined here are mainly disk file systems, things like your hard disk drive. Optical discs are a little different, so some of the formats for optical discs are things like ISO and UDF. And then if you're talking about things like tape drives, that's a different format yet. Ultimately, there's a lot of different file system types that are out there, and what you see right here are actually different categories of file systems.

Choosing a File System

How you format your different hard disk drives and your other devices largely depends on what operating system you're using. So for instance, if you're using Microsoft Windows, then you're probably using something like new technology file system, or NTFS. If you're using Linux, then maybe you're using the fourth extended file system, or ext4. If you're using macOS, then perhaps you're using the Apple file system, or APFS. Most likely, if you're using one of these systems, this is what you're using for those systems, since each one of those systems has a different preference on what you use.

If you have some media that needs to be switched between these different devices, these different operating systems, then that's when you go to something like file allocation table, or FAT.

Formatting a Drive

I'm on my demo laptop here, and I'm going to open up File Explorer. Within File Explorer I'm going to select This PC, and I can see my different drives or volumes. I'm going to select this volume right here, or this drive right here, right-click on it, and I am going to go down to format. Then we can see we could actually format this drive — this is preparing it with whatever file system that we want to put on here.

So as an example here, maybe the file system I set up right now is FAT32; that's the default for this type of device. Maybe I want to switch it to NTFS or exFAT, so I would select the one that I want to switch it to. I would select the allocation unit size — so this is how big those clusters are. Right now it's 496, but I can set it for something different. I would set it for something different if I'm going to have lots and lots of little small files; I probably want a smaller cluster size. But maybe I'm storing lots and lots of huge files, then maybe I'm going to have a bigger cluster size. So that's how I would choose it within here. Then I would give it some sort of name, and then click Start to do the formatting.

So this is how you would format or prepare a device that needs to be prepared. A lot of times I'll do this when I put a new device into a computer.