The Windows NT file system (NTFS) provides a combination of performance, reliability, and compatibility not found in the FAT file system. It is designed to quickly perform standard file operations such as read, write, and search – and even advanced operations such as file-system recovery – on very large hard disks.
Formatting a volume with the NTFS file system results in the creation of several system files and the Master File Table (MFT), which contains information about all the files and folders on the NTFS volume.
The first information on an NTFS volume is the Partition Boot Sector, which starts at sector 0 and can be up to 16 sectors long. The first file on an NTFS volume is the Master File Table MFT
The following figure illustrates the layout of an NTFS volume when formatting has finished.