eidenk, on Jun 29 2009, 03:47 PM, said:
jaclaz, on Jun 29 2009, 01:09 PM, said:
This said, there are
REASONS why Microsoft self-limited FAT32 volumes to 32 Gb:
http://www.allensmit...limit/FAT32.htm
a 32KB cluster size is a bit (read very) large, when you have to deal with small/medium sized files.
So, unless you know what you are doing
and you have an actual need for it, FAT32 volumes are better sized below said 32 Gb.
Well, the main reason for it is that, at some point in time, Microsoft determined that 2,097.152 (a.k.a. 2 MiB) clusters is the best compromise between wasted slack-space build-up and speed. With 32 kiB clusters this means 64 GiB. Yet, in the present, our hardware is much better than that used back then, so the size of the FAT-32 array or the number of clusters are of much less concern now, in what regards speed. So the real limit is where the software tools we're used to work with break. The DOS programs NDD (from NU 2002), SCANDISK, FORMAT & FDISK (from DOS 8, i. e. the DOS part of Win ME) are known to work ok with FAT-32 disks up to 500 GB. The Windows programs are the limit, IMHO: SCANDKSW (from Win ME) works OK up to 26.4 million clusters (26,389,392 clusters), while NDD32 (v. 18.0.0.62, from NSW 2005, or higher) works OK up to 7.8 million clusters (7,813,813 clusters). That's where I set my personal limit: 7,813,813 * 32 KiB = 238 GiB. With smaller partitions I usually use the (NT-family only)
fat32format.exe to change the default cluster to a smaller value, usually half the default, while keeping the total number of clusters at 6 million or less. I have been doing this since I found about fat32format (in 2007), and never had any problem because of this, neither on Win 98Se nor on Win XP. For a more extensive discussion of the numbers I used here one may refer to the
hdd size limits? thread and the links provided therein. While I'm fully aware that this is a matter where YMMV, 32 GiB is way too little for FAT-32, whatever arguments one might wish to use to defend it. Microsoft did that to push people into its proprietary, extensively undocumented, NTFS (which is a good file system also, but is far from being *THE SOLUTION*
). BTW, I've never had any success with using the undocumented /Z switch to force the DOS FORMAT to use the cluster size I wanted it to use. So I think that if someone has the time for it, a port of fat32format (which is open source) to Win 9x/ME is quite welcome and timely.
This post has been edited by dencorso: 30 June 2009 - 11:54 PM
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