NTFS stands for New Technology File System and is developed by Microsoft for use on their Windows operating systems. NTFS is not normally used on Linux systems, but has been the default file system on Windows for many years. Linux users are probably used to seeing drives with the ext4 file system, which is ordinarily the default and certainly the most widespread in the Linux realm.

Although NTFS is a proprietary file system meant especially for Windows, Linux systems still have the ability to mount partitions and disks that have been formatted as NTFS. Thus a Linux user could read and write files to the partition as easily as they could with a more Linux-oriented file system. This may come in handy if you need to troubleshoot problems for a Windows-formatted disk, or if you recover a disk from a Windows machine and want to read its contents.