http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT32 claims 4GB filesize, and 8TB partition size. the 32GB partition limit is a WinXP-ism to make people use NTFS.
a 300 Gb fat32 would have either an obscenely large fat table, or an obscenely large cluster size. if you used 4k clusters, each 'fat' table would be 300 megabytes, this has to be sequentially scanned to calcuate freespace, and it has to be scanned to find free blocks for file and directory allocations. If you used 32k byte clusters, this would be reduced to 37 megabytes for the FAT, but then even the tiniest files would waste 32 k bytes.
FAT also has no support for file ownership or access rights. It has no journaling, so any abnormal events such as unexpected/sudden reboots WILL result in lost freespace (orphaned files/fragments), AND its prone to crosslinking which is very hard to repair. FAT was designed for floppy disks and hard disks that were a few megabytes back in the early 80s. It has no way of grouping cluster allocations together, so it has a very strong tendancy to extreme fragmentation, and as the FAT tables are quite large on a filesystem this size, requires frequent extra seeks to locate the next block. 4GB is an absolute limit on size of a single file (so, no DVD ISO images, no large TARs, etc). Directories are sequentially scanned only, so large directories that spill over a few clusters become excruciatingly slow to even open files from.
_______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
