Hi all,
I'm following this DOS3/>32MB/FAT16 discussion very closely, but I have to
say 32 bit sectornumbers are a little too big. I agree with Egor that 24
bit is better. A little calculation:
2^32 x 512 bytes/sector = 2199023256000 bytes = 2 TB
Who in the world would want a 2 TERABYTE partition!?
Even with 24 bit sectornumbers you can have HUGE partitions:
2^24 x 512 bytes/sector = 8589934592 bytes = 8 GB
Even on my PC, where I have 14.8 GB storage capacity, I use 2 GB partitions
(except for one, which is 4.8 GB). That's 6 partitions...
Personally, I'd never use 8 GB partitions, because it would just become a
big mess. I use partitioning to sort stuff. I have a Win95 partition, a
mp3-partition, a warez-partition, etc...
In FAT12, you'd have 2 MEGABYTE PER CLUSTER for a 8 GB drive. As far as I
know, in Win95/MS-DOS the max. clustersize is 32kB just as in MSX and in
WinNT it's 64kB.
Imagine a batchfile taking up 64kB... Think of how slow it'll become.
Even when using FAT16, (and keeping the 32kB clusterlimit) that's a 2GB
max. per partition, still 4 times lower than the theoretical amount of 8GB
with 24 bit sectors.
If you want that kind of size, use FAT32... But FAT32 has the disadvantage
that it's so much slower too handle...
Anyway, just keep the sectornumbers within reasonable size. 24 bit is good
enough and takes less memory... You'd still have to use 2 16 bit registers
to pass it, but you can use the highest byte for something useful!
Greetz,
Patriek
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