Can anyone suggest a program to do this? I had one ages ago but lost it and can't remember its name.
Either for Windows or Mac. Thanks!
Either for Windows or Mac. Thanks!
Formatting Fat32 onto drives larger than 4Gb
- Thread starter Candlelight
- Start date
Yeah, I've had 250GB drives formatted with FAT32 just using the Windows tools.
The 4GB limitation on FAT32 has to do with files. You can't have a file larger than 4GB, due to the addressing scheme used by that file system.
The 4GB limitation on FAT32 has to do with files. You can't have a file larger than 4GB, due to the addressing scheme used by that file system.
I have a question on this (or at least closely related) subject, so I'll ask it here, rather than start a new thread. I have a 1TB drive I use in an external enclosure at work. It's used primarily with Linux, so it's formatted using ext4. However, I would like to be able to access it using Windows, Mac occasionally, and an older machine running an older (pre-ext4/no NTFS support) version of Red Hat. So, I was thinking of reformatting it using FAT32, but I've read that there can be a performance hit or other problems using FAT32 on drives that large. So my question is, how severe are those issues? Would they be bad enough that it's not worth doing that? or should I just use ext2 or ext3 and install a ext3 driver on any Windows machine I want to use the drive with?
The biggest downsides of using FAT32 on large drives are:
1. The 4GB filesize limit.
2. Cluster size/FAT size. The smaller your clusters, the bigger your FAT, and vice versa. If you're going to have a large number of small files, go for a smaller cluster size. If it's going to be mostly large files (tens or hundreds of MBs apiece), go for a larger cluster size.
Elaborating on point 2 a bit, if you go with 8KB clusters on a 1TB drive, you'll be wasting about half a gig on the file allocation table itself. Double the cluster size and the FAT shrinks by 50% (256MB). Go up to 32KB clusters and and your FAT is only 128MB, but it also means a tiny text file with a few lines will gobble up 32KB of disk space.
There's also no data integrity protection on FAT32. The main advantages of FAT are its performance in situations where a disk is not heavily fragmented, you have mostly large files, you don't keep a large number of files (1000+) in a single directory, and you have large cluster sizes. Journaled file systems like ext2/3/4 are slower per operation but data integrity is guaranteed. They also have much less slack (wasted) space, if I remember correctly, because they can use very small clusters.
In essence, whether or not you should use FAT32 will depend on your specific needs. Personally, I never see a good reason to use FAT32 when NTFS or a flavor of ext will do.
1. The 4GB filesize limit.
2. Cluster size/FAT size. The smaller your clusters, the bigger your FAT, and vice versa. If you're going to have a large number of small files, go for a smaller cluster size. If it's going to be mostly large files (tens or hundreds of MBs apiece), go for a larger cluster size.
Elaborating on point 2 a bit, if you go with 8KB clusters on a 1TB drive, you'll be wasting about half a gig on the file allocation table itself. Double the cluster size and the FAT shrinks by 50% (256MB). Go up to 32KB clusters and and your FAT is only 128MB, but it also means a tiny text file with a few lines will gobble up 32KB of disk space.
There's also no data integrity protection on FAT32. The main advantages of FAT are its performance in situations where a disk is not heavily fragmented, you have mostly large files, you don't keep a large number of files (1000+) in a single directory, and you have large cluster sizes. Journaled file systems like ext2/3/4 are slower per operation but data integrity is guaranteed. They also have much less slack (wasted) space, if I remember correctly, because they can use very small clusters.
In essence, whether or not you should use FAT32 will depend on your specific needs. Personally, I never see a good reason to use FAT32 when NTFS or a flavor of ext will do.
