FAT32 limit to number of files in folder

[Hamster]

I need to transfer map files onto my phone's micro sd card and I'm having some trouble. The maps are thousands of small files within subfolders of a folder on the sd card. The problem is that I've reached the FAT32 limit of files within that folder which is 65534. Is there any way around this limit, a 'fix' perhaps?

I know NTFS allows a lot more but the card needs to be in FAT32 for the Android phone.

 

[BigBoy]

Nope not unless the phone will read exfat partitions.

 

[Hamster]

Nope not unless the phone will read exfat partitions.

Thanks I think it will as I believe there is an exFAT partition but I've now discovered a way of producing the map as one large file now rather than many thousands of little ones. Also much better as it only takes a few minutes to transfer to the Class 2 SD card as opposed to nearly an hour and that's with the card in a USB2.0 reader. Transfers to the card whilst in the phone are painfully slow.

 

[Grenache]

NTFS would probably not have helped either. As a "by the way", there is a practical limit for NTFS. Although the theoretical limit is high, once you get more than about 3000 files in a single folder, the performance is dreadfully slow.

We did some tests a while ago timing how long it takes to add one new file in a folder. The first few files added were added really quickly as expected. By the time it got to 3000 or so, it was taking several seconds to add each new file.

 

[Hamster]

NTFS would probably not have helped either. As a "by the way", there is a practical limit for NTFS. Although the theoretical limit is high, once you get more than about 3000 files in a single folder, the performance is dreadfully slow.

We did some tests a while ago timing how long it takes to add one new file in a folder. The first few files added were added really quickly as expected. By the time it got to 3000 or so, it was taking several seconds to add each new file.

I've noticed the same sort of thing; first few burst through then a massive slowdown. For the purposes of the app on the phone reading those map files, it wasn't an issue though. Only the file number limit was.

When I've got loads of small files to transfer (and when I remember to) I put them in a rar archive on the pc, transfer that file across to the SD card then unrar on the card. I just did a test on my spare 8GB Class 2 Sandisk card formatted in ntfs and these were the times:

1) 11,945 files totalling 437MB in 16 different folders compressed into single .rar file took 1min30s
2) Transfer of the .rar file to the SD card took 1m01s
3) Decompressing the .rar file on the card (using card reader) into the original file structure took 5min40s
Total time: 8min11s

If I remember correctly it took about 45 minutes to copy/paste the files across by just selecting, copying and pasting so the compression/decompression method was over 5 times faster.

 

[Aod]

NTFS would probably not have helped either. As a "by the way", there is a practical limit for NTFS. Although the theoretical limit is high, once you get more than about 3000 files in a single folder, the performance is dreadfully slow.

We did some tests a while ago timing how long it takes to add one new file in a folder. The first few files added were added really quickly as expected. By the time it got to 3000 or so, it was taking several seconds to add each new file.

I don't know about that - I have a folder on an NTFS Partition with over 30,000 files in it and adding new files doesn't take noticeably longer than any other folder.