FAT32 filesystem
-
Hi, i am having trouble understanding FAT32 filesystem. As i understand there is a cluster in the file allocation table for each cluster in the data area of the disk (containing its address). But that would mean that half of the size of the disk would be taken up by FAT. If all the clusters in the data area are used that means that there is an equal number of clusters in the FAT that points to each and every one of them. Could someone please explain :)
-
Hi, i am having trouble understanding FAT32 filesystem. As i understand there is a cluster in the file allocation table for each cluster in the data area of the disk (containing its address). But that would mean that half of the size of the disk would be taken up by FAT. If all the clusters in the data area are used that means that there is an equal number of clusters in the FAT that points to each and every one of them. Could someone please explain :)
Hi, File Systems don't waste half of the disk space for administrative purposes; they typically need a map to keep track of allocation, i.e. one bit per sector (i.e. 1 bit for 512 bytes), or one bit per cluster. Clusters are just collections of N consecutive sectors, clustered file systems allocate by the cluster, not by the sector; the main purpose is to keep the allocation index shorter; in Windows they got introduced to make sure all the sectors of a partition can be located with a 16-bit index (so on a 320MB partition, there are 64K clusters of 5KB each). This[^] should contain the details for the Windows approach. :)
Luc Pattyn [Forum Guidelines] [Why QA sucks] [My Articles]
I only read code that is properly indented, and rendered in a non-proportional font; hint: use PRE tags in forum messages