michael hast wrote:
>> I can make a big partition, no problem. But FAT32 doesn't go >128
>> GiB. (There's only 70-something GiB of data anyway counting wasted
>> allocation space, so I could split the disk half FAT and half NTFS.)
>> Two filesystems are better than 5, so yeah, that'd be an improvement.
>>
>> Plus, what can I use to lay down a FAT filesystem? TTBOMK there's no
>> mkfs.vfat or similar.
>>
>> Anyhow, why should I think that FAT written thusly will be accessed
>> faster than what I have?
>>
> I should have specified that I didn't think that would fix your speed
> problem, but that maybe you could write a bigger partition that way.
> I've never tried to put down a partition that big in any format and I
> didn't realize that FAT32 won't go bigger than that. Learn something
> new everyday, right?
I know for a fact that I've made FAT32 volumes larger than 128GB with
mkdosfs, and I've successfully mounted said volumes under OS/X.
Honestly, I can't remember if I've tried mounting those volumes on a
Win2k/XP box (as I have no boxes running Windows natively), but I'm
fairly certain I did.
Microsoft doesn't want you to use FAT32 for volumes over 32GB in size.
So, if you use a Linux fdisk tool to make a large FAT32 partition, and
use mkdosfs to create the filesystem on it, you _can_ mount and use it
under Win2k/XP.
Looking on the net a bit, I've put together a little helpful information:
The maximum number of clusters on a volume on a FAT32 filesystem is
268,435,445. Cluster sizes vary.
If you make the cluster size more than 64KB, Win2k/XP will calculate
disk space incorrectly, but it should successfully mount it.
With that cluster size limit in mind, if you use a cluster size of 32KB,
you end up with a maximum theoretical volume size of ~8TB that should
function with Win2k/XP.
You cannot use ScanDisk with Win95/98/ME on a volume larger than 128GB
due to programmatic 16bit limitations.
With Win2k/XP, you can't create FAT32 volumes larger than that (you must
use Windows 98/SE). Windows 98/SE have an FDISK limitation for such
large partition sizes, however (ie, it can't create them, and older
unpatched versions can't see them).
I'm not sure how Win2k/XP's chkdsk will handle a huge FAT32 volume, it
should theoretically work however.
Now, technical reasons aside, I think you're insane for relying on a
FAT32 volume of that size. It doesn't scale well. Repairing the
filesystem is bound to be problematic.
You can always graft in ext2 drivers for Win2k or OS/X (not that ext2 is
a whole lot better, but I'd rely on ext2's fsck over chkdsk anyday)...
If you want to share a huge external USB drive between various platforms
with the least amount of fuss, FAT32 is the painless way of transporting it.
However, I'd only use this for _transporting_ data between machines, not
to _archive_ data with any criticality.
-- - Ian C. Blenke <icblenke@nks.net>
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