On 1/1/2016 2:36 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Fri, 1 Jan 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote:
I've seen this on digicams with CF cards. 2GB is the "official" limit
to FAT16 filesystems. However, XP and later can format 4GB cards to
FAT16 as well--and it seems to work very well with my older cameras,
which do not understand FAT32.
While, at the time, 2G seemed "infinite", even then, I was amused at
the 2G limitation being due to the use of a SIGNED 32 bit number. The
size can be anywhere from -2147483648 to 2147483647.
By switching to an UNSIGNED 32, NT and the like made the limit 4G.
I think it was actually the sectors per cluster number, which was -64 to
63, I believe and then got changed to 0-128, meaning cluster sizes of
128 512-byte sectors, or 64K clusters
I know folks will hate on the format, but I am extremely impressed with
the FAT format. To go all the way from floppies to 4TB drives is
impressive.
Jim
--
Jim Brain
[email protected]
www.jbrain.com
