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The limit on partition size was dictated by the 8-bit signed count of sectors per cluster, which originally had a maximum power-of-two value of 64. With the standard hard disk sector size of 512 bytes, this gives a maximum of 32 KB cluster size, thereby fixing the "definitive" limit for the FAT16 partition size at 2 GB for sector size 512.
Cluster sizes vary depending on the type of FAT file system being used and the size of the drive; typical cluster sizes range from 2 to 32 KiB. [39] Each file may occupy one or more clusters depending on its size. Thus, a file is represented by a chain of clusters (referred to as a singly linked list).
Originally MS-DOS was designed to be an operating system that could run on any computer ... Hard drive: partition size max ... FAT16, FAT16B, FAT32 720 KB; 1.44 MB, 2 ...
No limit defined [cf] 64 MiB (67.10 MB) 2 GiB (2.147 GB) ? ZFS: 255 bytes Any Unicode except NUL No limit defined [cf] 16 EiB (18.44 EB) 281,474,976,710,656 YiB (2 128 bytes) 2 128: File system Maximum filename length Allowable characters in directory entries [cc] Maximum pathname length Maximum file size Maximum volume size [cd] Max number of ...
Because file size references are stored in eight instead of four bytes, the file size limit has increased to 16 exabytes (EB) (2 64 − 1 bytes, or about 10 19 bytes, which is otherwise limited by a maximum volume size of 128 PB, [nb 2] or 2 57 − 1 bytes), raised from 4 GB (2 32 − 1 bytes) in a standard FAT32 file system. [1]
For example, the FAT32 file system does not support files larger than 4 GiB−1 (with older applications even only 2 GiB−1); the variant FAT32+ does support larger files (up to 256 GiB−1), but (so far) is only supported in some versions of DR-DOS, [2] [3] so users of Microsoft Windows have to use NTFS or exFAT instead.
If the actual size of the disk exceeds the maximum partition size representable using the legacy 32-bit LBA entries in the MBR partition table, the recorded size of this partition is clipped at the maximum, thereby ignoring the rest of the disk. This amounts to a maximum reported size of 2 TiB, assuming a disk with 512 bytes per sector (see 512e).
FAT32 addresses the limitations in FAT12 and FAT16, except for the file size limit of close to 4 GB, but it remains limited compared to NTFS. FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 also have a limit of eight characters for the file name, and three characters for the extension (such as .exe). This is commonly referred to as the 8.3 filename limit.