Report On How Data Is Stored In Windows

When you click ‘save’ on a file on your computer, what happens? A computer, specifically one running the Microsoft Windows operating system, stores data in a number of different ways. There are a couple ways in which these files are stored; first, there is the hard drive itself. It carries the capacity to hold a great variety of data through the help of a file system (like NTFS or FAT32). A file system’s job is to organize and segment the data into a way that is more accessible to the user (folders, directories, etc.). Also, RAM (Random Access Memory) can be used to store data, but this is on a more temporary basis. This gives the computer added power to run more complex programs more quickly – the more RAM you have, the more wiggle room your computer has to run advanced applications.
In simple terms, a file is organized in a file system into segments called clusters or blocks. A file system is made up of free blocks that are available to be filled with data. In a perfect system, files are stored in continuous blocks that are connected to each other, keeping the file together. For example, a 3000 kilobyte file could fit into three 1000 kilobyte files; three of these blocks would be filled with part of this file, and stored next to each other in order to access the file quickly when the user calls for it. Instead, when you delete a file, the space that it originally filled still remains – all that has happened is that the file system marks data in a different way, and takes out all references it has in the directory structure. As a result the computer merely marks it as unallocated space; this does not necessarily mean that the file is gone – whenever new information needs that space, it merely overwrites that data. The memory capacity remains the same, merely bypassing that ‘deleted’ data within the context of an operating system like Windows.