What is the difference between NTFS and RAW

NTFS, short for New Technology File System, is a filesystem introduced by Microsoft in 1993 for use on Windows NT PCs. Generally, a filesystem is a way of organizing and storing files and folders on a volume. Thus, both metadata records and user data are stored on an NTFS disk, and the operating system can read the metadata records and find out which files and folders are stored on the disk, how and where.

Unlike NTFS, RAW means NO filesystem at all, that is the operating system thinks there are no valid filesystem metadata entries on the disk, which means (in terms of the filesystem) that the disk is empty and ready to be formatted. As soon as such a disk is connected to a PC, the operating system driver responsible for storage systems scans data in certain areas of the disk to find boot sectors from known file systems there. If these boot sectors are found, the driver parses the metadata and provides access to the data stored on the disk. If this does not work out, then the disk is considered empty, that is, RAW, and the operating system suggests formatting it in order to start placing data on it.

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