-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Tuesday 2008-07-22 at 19:33 -0400, Greg Freemyer wrote:
the FAT's themselves need to be resident in memory all at once to maintain consistency? That sorta limits how big volumes might get.
Don't think so. I have not noticed our large drives being particularly slow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_allocation_table#FAT32 ] Windows 2000 and Windows XP can read and write to FAT32 file systems of ] any size, but the format program included in Windows 2000 and higher ] can only create FAT32 file systems of 32 GB or less. This limitation is ] by design and according to Microsoft was imposed because many tasks on ] a very large FAT32 file system become slow and inefficient.[12][16] ] This limitation can be bypassed by using third-party formatting ] utilities or by using the built-in FORMAT.EXE command-line ] utility.[17][18] ...
We still use FAT as our open standard. With big files we break them apart via split. Re-assemble with cat.
Our industry (Computer Forenisics) actually has lots of tools that work with the split files since the need to so great.
Now, I wonder why the 4 GiB file size limit. The wikipedia says: ] The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 ] "null" byte (232−1 bytes). Video applications, large databases, and ] some other software easily exceed this limit. Larger files require ] another formatting type such as HFS+ or NTFS. Until mid-2006, those who ] run dual boot systems or who move external data drives between ] computers with different operating systems had little choice but to ] stick with FAT32. Since then, full support for NTFS has become ] available in Linux and many other operating systems, by installing the ] FUSE library (on Linux) together with the NTFS-3G driver. Data exchange ] is also possible between Windows and Linux by using the Linux-native ] ext2 or ext3 file systems through the use of external drivers for ] Windows, such as ext2 IFS; however, Windows cannot boot from ext2 or ] ext3 partitions. But just now I can't think what's the technical reason for this limit :-? If it were a cluster count limit (per file), the size limit would vary with cluster size... There is an exFAT format that allows 2^64 bytes per file. I didn't know of that filesystem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4-svn0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFIhoN6tTMYHG2NR9URArbZAJ43MZtDgSXeyNPn/fOu6bxXL8oUHwCfW0w4 kUdwdXS9sR8JRvVMh5w8OqU= =7dV7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----