On 8/24/2010 6:22 PM, Bob Proulx wrote:
Jochen Schulz wrote:Bob Proulx:It is "just a disk drive". There isn't anything magical about it having come with FAT32. That is just a mild convenience so that the casual MS user does not need to format it themselves. But they could and you could too.No, they couldn't. :) Windows (since at least XP) doesn't allow formatting disks larger than (IIRC) 32GB with the FAT filesystem. It's either NTFS or… NTFS.So... FAT32 supports up to 8T in size, MS-XP can use it, but MS-XP won't format it? Wow. I did not know that XP had that limitation. Thanks for that tidbit. I will add it to my list of MS problems. In any case, it just makes recommending moving to a native filesystem like ext3 that much easier. Bob
No, FAT supports up to 16TB, but I don't remember ever seeing Linux having cluster support that high, at least stably, I don't even think Linux has strong support for 32KB clusters. It's safe to say that 2TB is the universal size for FAT32. Which is what the average consumer would have, unless they actually got hold of some nice raid hardware. Yes, Windows XP will format a drive way past 32GB, it's plain silly to say it won't, you have to manually chose the cluster size though. Another anti-Microsoft fan I assume. Personally for backups I would rather choose XFS or EXT4. The company that stores the most data in the world obviously knows what they are doing, and XFS was number one for them until they learned you could do live migration to EXT4 from EXT2 which would streamline a lot of things and make it easier to manage data. Direct IO seems to be a lot better on EXT4 and XFS too.