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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]
There are several variants of the FAT file system (e.g. FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32). FAT16 refers to both the original group of FAT file systems with 16-bit wide cluster entries and also to later variants. "VFAT" is an optional extension for long file names, which can work on top of any FAT file system. Volumes using VFAT long-filenames can be read ...
Microsoft and IBM operating systems determine the type of FAT file system used on a volume solely by the number of clusters, not by the used BPB format or the indicated file system type, that is, it is technically possible to use a "FAT32 EBPB" also for FAT12 and FAT16 volumes as well as a DOS 4.0 EBPB for small FAT32 volumes.
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.
In 2017, Tuxera introduced FAT+, [15] a file system implementation for Universal Flash Storage cards and removable storage that is compatible with FAT32 but without the file size limitation of 4 GiB. It is royalty free for UFS card host devices [ 16 ] and a standard recommended by the Universal Flash Storage Association.
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.
Windows 7 also supports the newer exFAT file system. As the ReadyBoost cache is stored as a file, the flash drive must be formatted as FAT32, NTFS, or exFAT in order to have a cache size greater than FAT16's 2 GB filesize limit; if the desired cache size is 4 GB (the FAT32 filesize limit) or larger, the drive must be formatted as NTFS or exFAT.
HPFS (High Performance File System) is a file system created specifically for the OS/2 operating system to improve upon the limitations of the FAT file system. It was written by Gordon Letwin and others at Microsoft and added to OS/2 version 1.2 , at that time still a joint undertaking of Microsoft and IBM , and released in 1988.