FAT32 8TiB limitation

[CZroe]

Heh heh... Just wondering what happens when you try to partition/format an 8+TiB disk now that we can so easily hit that limit.

If anyone is setting up a JBOD or array over 8TiB, why not try it before you start storing data, for curiosity's sake? 😉 If my drives weren't on two different coasts right now, I'd try it!

Now, I know FDISK won't work on even sub-100GB drives even though FAT32 supports it, so what do you guys use to partition a large FAT32 disk these days?

And don't ask me why I'd ever need a large FAT32 drive. 🙄 I run into the need almost daily and it's why most external HDDs still come pre-formatted for FAT32. For example, I needed one for Blu-ray dumps using my PS3 w/SAK (before I had a BD drive/burner in my PC). Now I need one for PS3 backups.

 

[bacillus]

Use fdisk from ME for drives >64GB

 

[yinan]

There is no reason to use FAT32 anymore, every modern version of Windows uses NTFS. And there are so many less restrictions with it than with FAT32. Also, how are you getting BR dumps on a FAT32 filesystem when it will not support files that large?

 

[Voo]

Well FAT32 uses 32bit to represent one cluster, from which 28bit are used for the address. This means we can have a maximum of 2^28 clusters.

No idea why everyone's using 32KiB for one cluster (well obviously it gets quite inefficient if you just continue to increase the size and have small files) since FAT16 already allowed 64KiB cluster sizes - though I haven't read the specification in detail so maybe it's specified there or just for backwards compatibility (probably, especially considering that that's the only reasonable reason to use FAT at all).

Also I'd think that the 4GiB limitation is quite a bit more problematic before you run into other problems 😉

 

[Nothinman]

Heh heh... Just wondering what happens when you try to partition/format an 8+TiB disk now that we can so easily hit that limit.

If anyone is setting up a JBOD or array over 8TiB, why not try it before you start storing data, for curiosity's sake? 😉 If my drives weren't on two different coasts right now, I'd try it!

Now, I know FDISK won't work on even sub-100GB drives even though FAT32 supports it, so what do you guys use to partition a large FAT32 disk these days?

And don't ask me why I'd ever need a large FAT32 drive. 🙄 I run into the need almost daily and it's why most external HDDs still come pre-formatted for FAT32. For example, I needed one for Blu-ray dumps using my PS3 w/SAK (before I had a BD drive/burner in my PC). Now I need one for PS3 backups.

Most likely the tool creating the filesystem would just error out as it wouldn't have enough addresses to cover the clusters in the filesystem. But when even MS starts pushing you away from something they used to support (in this cause by putting an artificial limit in their filesystem creation tools) you should start to wonder why you're forcing yourself down that path. I'm sure there are any number of technically better and usable solutions than to continue using FAT for anything except for small USB sticks.

 

[CZroe]

Use fdisk from ME for drives >64GB

Thanks. This may come in useful someday.

There is no reason to use FAT32 anymore, every modern version of Windows uses NTFS. And there are so many less restrictions with it than with FAT32. Also, how are you getting BR dumps on a FAT32 filesystem when it will not support files that large?

Simple: Swiss Army Knife (the PS3 dump utility integrated into Linux) splits them up. For some reason it doesn't support Linux file systems even though it's basically a tiny Linux distro executing normally on the PS3 (yes, mine still runs Linux on FW3.15). It supposedly supports UDF but I've never found a way to format a USBMASS device as UDF.

As for using it for massive drives, I don't. The largest drives I have with FAT32 are pre-formatted 500GB external USB HDDs. Even so, not only did I say...

...don't ask me why I'd ever need a large FAT32 drive. 🙄 ...

...but I even gave some examples of why I might need it......

...I run into the need [for FAT32] almost daily and it's why most external HDDs still come pre-formatted for FAT32. For example, I needed one for Blu-ray dumps using my PS3 w/SAK (before I had a BD drive/burner in my PC). Now I need one for PS3 backups.

...to satisfy that question before it was asked. 😉

...Also I'd think that the 4GiB limitation is quite a bit more problematic before you run into other problems 😉

Of course. I run into it with USB storage devices all too often.