NetWare File System

In computing, the NetWare File System (NWFS) was a file system based on a heavily optimized, journal-based FAT file system. It was used in the Novell NetWare network operating system. It was the only file system for all volumes in NetWare versions 2.x, 3.x and 4.x, and the default and only file system for the SYS: volume continuing through version 5.x. Novell developed two varieties of NWFS:

In NetWare 5 and above, Novell Storage Services (NSS, released in 1998), superseded the NWFS format.

The NWFS on-disk format was never publicly released by Novell, but it was released by former Novell engineers as an open source project on Windows, Linux, and DOS in 2000. The project contains a complete rewrite of the NetWare File System, publishes all of the file system internals, and is hosted on GitHub and GitLab.

The published specifications for 32-bit NWFS are:

For larger files, the file system utilized a performance feature named Turbo FAT.^{[citation needed]}

Transparent file compression was also supported, although this had a significant impact on the performance of file serving.

Every name space requires its own separate directory entry for each file. While the maximum number of directory entries is 16,000,000, two resident name spaces would reduce the usable maximum number of directory entries to 8,000,000, and three to 5,333,333.

16-bit NWFS could handle volumes of up to 256 MB. However, its only name-space support was a dedicated API to handle Macintosh clients.