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Its main benefit is its exceeding of the 4 GB file size limit, as file size references are stored with eight instead of four bytes, increasing the limit to 2 64 − 1 bytes. Microsoft's GUI and command-line format utilities offer it as an alternative to NTFS (and, for smaller partitions, to FAT16B and FAT32 ).
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]
The FAT file system is a file system used on MS-DOS and Windows 9x family of operating systems. [3] It continues to be used on mobile devices and embedded systems, and thus is a well-suited file system for data exchange between computers and devices of almost any type and age from 1981 through to the present.
While storage devices usually have their size expressed in powers of 10 (for instance a 1 TB Solid State Drive will contain at least 1,000,000,000,000 (10 12, 1000 4) bytes), filesystem limits are invariably powers of 2, so usually expressed with IEC prefixes. For instance, a 1 TiB limit means 2 40, 1024 4 bytes. Approximations (rounding down ...
The NTFS maximum theoretical limit on the size of individual files is 16 EB [a] [28] (16 × 1024 6 or 2 64 bytes) minus 1 KB, which totals 18,446,744,073,709,550,592 bytes. With Windows 10 version 1709 and Windows Server 2019 , the maximum implemented file size is 8 PB [ a ] minus 2 MB or 9,007,199,252,643,840 bytes.
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.
The change to 64-bit file sizes frequently required incompatible changes to file system layout, which meant that large-file support sometimes necessitated a file system change. 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 ...
File size is a measure of how much data a computer file contains or how much storage space it is allocated. Typically, file size is expressed in units based on byte . A large value is often expressed with a metric prefix (as in megabyte and gigabyte ) or a binary prefix (as in mebibyte and gibibyte ).