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Old 10-14-2020, 12:19 AM   #8
DNSB
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ownedbycats View Post
For FAT32 in specific:

4 GB file size
8 TB maximum partition size
4194304 files on volume

255 characters in file paths, but I think NTFS has this limitation too

It also doesn't like power interruptions (NTFS and I think ext3 uses journaling/transactions, which provides some protection against the filesystem getting scrambled).

The main advantage of FAT32 is that it's pretty much compatible with everything.
May I ask where you got those numbers from?

The numbers I have kicking around in some older Microsoft documentation (Windows 98SE era) were:

Max disk size: 2 terabytes
Max file size: 4 gigabytes (2^32-1)
Max number of files on disk: 268435437 (2^28-19)
Max number of files in a single folder: 65534 (2^16-1)

There's is some vague memory of being able to use a FAT32 partition from 4 -16 terabyte but that required using 1024-4096 byte sectors which was not Microsoft supported out of the box.

Also note the file numbers drop when long file names are using since FAT32 LFNs use multiple directory entries -- a maximum 255 character LFN would use 20 directory entries plus 1 for the short file name. Then you use two for the . and .. directory entries other than the root directory.

I got bitten by this a couple of decades back where a backup solution used very long filenames for the backup indexes and crashed when the number of backup index entries was about 7500 though that volume was less than 50% full.
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