why do cdroms use the iso 9660 file system and not a file system like FAT or NTFS ?
The CD-ROM was originally intended to be a replacement for the old vinyl technology used to distribute music – records. This means that the CD-ROM works actually quite a lot like a record: It doesn’t have sectors like magnetic computer storage like floppy disks or hard drives. The data on a CD-ROM is stored in a completely linear mode like on a record – you start writing in the middle and work yourself out in circles towards the outer parts of the disc; this is why reading from the last part of the disk is much faster than reading from the beginning – the rotation speed is much higher at the edges). File systems for disk devices (and others) generally use sectors. Sectors are fractional parts of a track (which is a full circle around the platter). In hard drives and floppies you can easily jump between tracks and sectors but this is not the case with the CD-ROM because of its legacy – the CD-ROM read head follows the track (even though it can skip to other tracks) and is very slow to h
