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View Full Version : Fat32 hard drive size limit

Kruno
10-08-02, 05:05 AM
I would like to know all disadvantages with using an 80 gig hard drive on a fat 32 system.
StealthHawk
10-08-02, 05:09 AM
without partitioning a large drive with FAT32, cluster size will be 32KB.

of course this effects much smaller drives as well. i remember when FAT32 first came out the rage was 4KB clusters that saved disk space for small files compared to FAT16 :p
Kruno
10-08-02, 05:24 AM
How about size limit? 32GB?
The Baron
10-08-02, 09:46 AM
Well wait a minute, it says in your sig you're running WinXP, so WHY?!

NTFS is WAAAAY better...
saturnotaku
10-08-02, 10:14 AM
Originally posted by =SSC=The Baron
Well wait a minute, it says in your sig you're running WinXP, so WHY?!

Because FAT32 and Linux get along better. NTFS read support in Linux is experimental at best and writing is almost totally unsupported. Within Linux you can read and write files to and from FAT32 partitions without breaking a sweat.

Hopefully full NTFS support will be available in the next stable kernel release (2.6 if I'm not mistaken).
Gator
10-08-02, 10:26 AM
i could be wrong, but i think fat32 can support up to 3 terrabytes

NTFS is better than FAT32

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/prkc_fil_duwx.asp
The Baron
10-08-02, 11:08 AM
Because FAT32 and Linux get along better. NTFS read support in Linux is experimental at best and writing is almost totally unsupported. Within Linux you can read and write files to and from FAT32 partitions without breaking a sweat.

"Experimental" in Linux doesn't mean the same as experimental in Windows. Just mean that it might write 1 bit wrong in 10,000,000,000. So it's not worth the performance loss if you're going to use WinXP on an 80 gig drive.

And yes, writing works too. Go check out Knoppix (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html) .

I put the thing in the drive, booted, and it saw my WinXP partition just peachily.
StealthHawk
10-08-02, 03:12 PM
Originally posted by K.I.L.E.R
How about size limit? 32GB?

don't know, but i'm sure it's more than the capacity of a single drive these days. defintely more than 32GB, though.
Kruno
10-08-02, 07:22 PM
Dudes it is not for me but for a friend (the info).
Linux gets along better in it's own format. :)
I have 2 partitions :)