Wikipedia
NTFS
NTFS (New Technology File System) is a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft. Starting with Windows NT 3.1, it is the default file system of Windows NT family.
NTFS has several technical improvements over FAT and HPFS ( High Performance File System), the file systems that it superseded, such as improved support for metadata, and the use of advanced data structures to improve performance, reliability, and disk space utilization, plus additional extensions, such as security access control lists (ACL) and file system journaling.
Mac OS X kernels also have a limited ability to read NTFS; Linux and BSD kernels have a free and open-source driver for the NTFS filesystem with both read and write functionality.