FAT32 & Large Drives

gamesaregood

gamesaregood

gamesaregood

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Hello,

I thought the Max you should format a drive to FAT32 should be 32gb but i have just purchased a 400gb External Drives and its come new with a 372gb FAT32 partition!

I thought anything about 32gb was unstable for the FAT32 file system?

I think i will format the drive to NTFS anyway but it seems very strange to me!

Thanks,

Michael
 
I also have a Maxtor external and a Western Digital external - both of which are 300gb and 500gb respectivly and both are fat32.

Nice thing is that fat32 is OS friendly without hassle
 
Yeah but the trouble is FAT32 does not accecpt files bigger then 2gb(or 4gb??). It's also less secure, doesn't allow encryption, compression or quotas. The only advantage is the OS friendliness with older versions of windows and Mac OS.
 
gamesaregood said:
I thought the Max you should format a drive to FAT32 should be 32gb but i have just purchased a 400gb External Drives and its come new with a 372gb FAT32 partition!
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FAT32 will support volumes up to 2Tb but MS have crippled Windows so that it will only format FAT32 up to 32Gb to encourage folk to use NTFS.

There's nothing wrong with using FAT32 for big disks, in fact if you want cross platform support then it's the way to go. I found, however, that my external Lacie drive performed a whole lot better when formatted as NTFS.
 
manoz said:
Yeah but the trouble is FAT32 does not accecpt files bigger then 2gb(or 4gb??). It's also less secure, doesn't allow encryption, compression or quotas. The only advantage is the OS friendliness with older versions of windows and Mac OS.
Click to expand...
It's 2gb. I find FAT32 fine on my external drive, as I don't need encryption, compression or quotas. :)
 
rpstewart said:
FAT32 will support volumes up to 2Tb but MS have crippled Windows so that it will only format FAT32 up to 32Gb to encourage folk to use NTFS.
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This is quite true. A 3rd-party formatter or the inbuilt formatters in OS X and most Linux distributions will be able to create a FAT32 partition on volumes up to 2 TiB.
 
quantumisation said:
fat32 shouldnt even be an issue by now who could possibly be using it? i have used linux much lately but im sure you could even read ntfs partitions in it now
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FAT16/32 is incredibly easy to implement so there is still a huge market for it - every digital camera uses one or other as do most MP3 players. The simplicity brings cross platform support, Macs, Linux and Windows can all read FAT filesystems so any third party device can be accessed without the need for drivers at the filesystem level.

There is nothing inherently wrong with FAT that means it should be consigned to the history books. NTFS, WinFS, JFS etc have their advantages for large systems but there are times when the complexity is just an overhead, for those FAT is perfect.
 
Phemo said:
For FAT16, correct. FAT32's file size limit is 4GB however - just to avoid further confusion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#FAT32
http://www.mcmcse.com/windows_xp/guides/filesystems.shtml
Click to expand...

What confusion?

Justintime said:
tis 4gb, think 2gb is FAT16s file size limit.
Click to expand...

Its you that said FAt16s partition limit was 2gb no where did i say 4Gb was not FAT32s file size limit, knew that from since the days i was making huge avis and anything over 4Gb failed ;)
 
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