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FAT32 benefits
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Original Message
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Name: Valerie (by Garibaldi)
Date: April 21, 2004 at 00:55:50 Pacific
Subject: FAT32 benefitsOS: Win98seCPU/Ram: 166/enough |
Comment: I recently installed Win98se and have been doing a lot of reading. I am apparently running FAT16 with the capability of changing this to FAT32 but what are the benefits of doing so please? Thanks Virginia
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Response Number 1
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Name: DAVEINCAPS
Date: April 21, 2004 at 01:21:16 Pacific
Subject: FAT32 benefits |
Reply: (edit)Probably the most noticable difference is you'd have more free space on your HD. This is because windows specifies a minimum amount of space a file can occupy. For the drive you're using that space is probably 32K in fat16 and 4K in fat32. What that means is if you have a file that, for example, is 3K in size it will occupy 32K of space in fat16 but only 4K in fat32. So with fat16 you have 29K of wasted space (32-3) but in fat32 you only have 1K of wasted space. With thousands of files on the typical HD that can add up to quite a bit of space when converting to fat32. Another benefit is that files should open and run quicker although you may not notice the difference. The downside could be if you're running some old dos software, it may not run properly. I keep the computer I'm on now at fat16. This allows me to use some of the old dos commands like 'undelete' that won't work in fat32. But for the typical user converting to fat32 would be the way to go.
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Response Number 3
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Name: DAVEINCAPS
Date: April 21, 2004 at 01:24:15 Pacific
Subject: FAT32 benefits |
Reply: (edit)Oh, and fat16 can only accomodate a partition up to 2 gig so any HD larger than that would need to have multiple partitions.
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Response Number 5
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Name: jboy
Date: April 21, 2004 at 08:16:27 Pacific
Subject: FAT32 benefits |
Reply: (edit)Sure - you need FAT32 for drives larger than 2Gb, otherwise you'd be dividing the disk into many partitions (and there are only so many letters in the alphabet). As has been mentioned, slack space is a consideration when using FAT16. As well, FAT16 drives had an upper limit of 512 files or directories allowed in the root directory (C:\) which, if exceeded, can generate some interesting error messages.
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Response Number 6
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Name: Valerie (by Garibaldi)
Date: April 21, 2004 at 15:34:00 Pacific
Subject: FAT32 benefits |
Reply: (edit)Thank you all for the responses - I guess I'll have to do a lot more thinking - and test out my old DOS progs. Virginia
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Response Number 7
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Name: jboy
Date: April 21, 2004 at 15:46:05 Pacific
Subject: FAT32 benefits |
Reply: (edit)Most things run alright, it's disk utilities that typically encounter problems. #5 - should read when the upper limit is reached - it can't actually be exceeded (being a limit & all that)
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Response Number 8
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Name: DAVEINCAPS
Date: April 21, 2004 at 23:31:09 Pacific
Subject: FAT32 benefits |
Reply: (edit)Yeah, I've only had problem with old dos and norton utility commands. I have a win31 HD that I copy to another HD when I'm putting together a new computer. Then I upgrade that to 98. There's 25 or 30 win31 games on it and I've never noticed any problems with them after converting to fat32. Also, before making any changes, the conversion process will do a quick check of your system to see if any software that's incompatible with fat32 exists on your HD. It may only be checking windows files--I don't know for sure.
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