4GB FAT limitation

[biggiesmallz]

I heard many times that there is a 4GB limitation per file when using FAT file system. How come I am able to make a file bigger than 4GB using FAT file system? Will it cause unseen problems?

 

[Continuity28]

Yes, FAT32 has a 4GB file size limitation. (32-bit)

It's easily noticable when you do video editing/encoding. In some cases, if you edit or encode these files in DV, YUY2, YV12, or using HUFFYUV for examples (these are relatively lossless codecs and will produce large files) your encoder will fail to output the file past the 4GB mark. Are you sure you're really passing 4GB? 4GB in hard drive space is 4,294,967,296 bytes by the way. There are work-arounds, but it's much better to work with NTFS if you're using Windows anyways..

 

[biggiesmallz]

Originally posted by: Continuity28
Yes, FAT32 has a 4GB file size limitation. (32-bit)

It's easily noticable when you do video editing/encoding. In some cases, if you edit or encode these files in DV, YUY2, YV12, or using HUFFYUV for examples (these are relatively lossless codecs and will produce large files) your encoder will fail to output the file past the 4GB mark. Are you sure you're really passing 4GB? 4GB in hard drive space is 4,294,967,296 bytes by the way. There are work-arounds, but it's much better to work with NTFS if you're using Windows anyways..

I'm using truecrypt to make a 4.7GB container formatted in FAT and it then filling it up with files to burn to DVD and it is seems like it is working.

 

[Continuity28]

This is taken from TrueCrypt's User Manual:

Q: What is the maximum possible size of a TrueCrypt volume?

A: TrueCrypt volumes can be up to 9223372036 GB. However, you need to take into account the following: the limitations of the file system that the container will be stored on, the limitations of the file system of the container itself, the hardware connection standard, and your operating system limitations. Remember that file-hosted containers stored on the FAT32 file system cannot be larger than 4 GB (if you need a larger volume, store it on the NTFS file system or, instead of creating a file-hosted volume, encrypt a partition). Also note that any FAT32 volume, encrypted or not, cannot be larger than 2048 GB (if you need larger volumes, format them as NTFS).

So, either you didn't reach this limitation yet, or something else.. I'm not sure how that particular program works.

 

[Continuity28]

Just to keep something in mind though: Just because a file container says it's 4.7 GB, doesn't make it so.

For example, if you use BitTorrent, once you start downloading, it "reserves" the amount of space, but doesn't yet fill it. The files that haven't yet been downloaded will say x.x GB, but really, it's only a couple of bytes, until the gap within becomes filled. I suspect once you fill that container to above 4 GB you'll run into an error of some sort.