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[Doggy124]

What are different between FAT/FAT16/FAT32?

[sonicwind]

FAT=FAT16
FAT32=has higher capacity.  FAT16 only goes to 2GB cards while 32 can go up to 8 and is faster.

[ratx]

FAT16 supports 4g with 64k clusters, its just windows never supported 64k clusters - hence lots of people belive the limit is 2g...

[meangreenie]

I believe the limit on FAT32 is far higher than 8GB, I'm sure I used to have an 80GB drive formatted in fat32. (had to use a specialist format tool, as windows format tool is limited to 32GB, though windows can use bigger fat32 formatted partitions..it just can't format them with it's own tool)

Also, FAT16 is widely thought to be faster than FAT32, especially when it's mentioned in regards to all these type of flashcarts.

[sardaukar]

FAT16 is faster than FAT32. And there is no limit on FAT32 partition size, only on file size (2GB). However, in order to fit all clusters as a 32 bit number (4 million and something) means that if you have a 32 GAZILLIAByte partition, you need to have something like 1 GB clusters, leading to immense waste. A sane limit may be 2^32 * 128kB clusters.

[boy_silip]

FAT16 is faster than FAT32. And there is no limit on FAT32 partition size, only on file size (2GB). However, in order to fit all clusters as a 32 bit number (4 million and something) means that if you have a 32 GAZILLIAByte partition, you need to have something like 1 GB clusters, leading to immense waste. A sane limit may be 2^32 * 128kB clusters.

so its more efficient to format my minisd to fat 16??

[ratx]

If you're a supercard use you have no choice, it doesn't support FAT32

[boy_silip]

If you're a supercard use you have no choice, it doesn't support FAT32

tnx sir!
im gonna format my minisd now to fat16

[sardaukar]

The only advantage I see for FAT32, apart from supporting larger cards of course, would be long file name support, but somehow SC already supports this. No idea how, though.

[Perseid]

So...I get mixed information on this. Does the SC SD support 4GB cards or not?

[sardaukar]

In theory it does not, as it exceeds FAT16's partition size. From Wikipedia on FAT16 :

With the usual hard disk sector size of 512 bytes, this gives 32 KB clusters, hence fixing the "definitive" limit for the FAT16 partition size at 2 gigabytes. On magneto-optical media, which can have 1 or 2 KB sectors, the limit is proportionally greater.

Much later, Windows NT increased the maximum cluster size to 64 KB by considering the sectors-per-cluster count as unsigned. However, the resulting format was not compatible with any other FAT implementation of the time, and anyway, generated massive internal fragmentation. Windows 98 also supported reading and writing this variant, but its disk utilities didn't work with it.

Alas, SC devs have already implemented long file names on FAT16 so this partition size increase can be a possibility too. But very slim, mind you - the SD card reader on the SC must still support 4GB cards.

In the end, if you want big cards, go with CF.

[bitblt]

4GB SD Card on Supercard
http://scdev.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6412

[Xenomorph]

The only advantage I see for FAT32, apart from supporting larger cards of course, would be long file name support, but somehow SC already supports this. No idea how, though.

"Long File Names" are NOT a FAT16/FAT32 issue.

Its more of a "VFAT" thing. Long File Names can be used fine with FAT16 or FAT32.

Obviously anyone can check this out with any current version of Windows. XP for example has no problem making long file names on any FAT16 partition.

FAT16 can go up to 4 gigs in partition size, and I haven't seen an SD card bigger than 2 gigs. Using FAT32 wouldn't give much of an advantage there either.

I believe FAT16 does have a 512 file limit in the root directory. The work around of course is to use sub directories. Plus the larger cluster sizes aren't as efficient for lots of tiny files (most of the space taken up on my microSD card are by 8-128 MegaByte files, so I'm not worried about large cluster size). Other than those two points, there isn't much of an advantage to FAT32 over FAT16 right now with SuperCards.

I've seen other people post things along the line of them believing FAT32 would somehow let you sort things better or use long file names - it simply doesn't have an advantage there over FAT16.

[bitblt]

I've seen other people post things along the line of them believing FAT32 would somehow let you sort things better or use long file names - it simply doesn't have an advantage there over FAT16.

FAT32 can support 8GB+ flash media.