CertiGuide to A+ (A+ 4 Real)  9  Chapter 1: What are Operating Systems and How Do They Work?       9  File Structure            9  Partitioning, Formatting and File Systems

FAT16 1 NTFS v4

FAT32 removed the 2 GB limit on file system size. Up to 2 TB (Terabytes) can be addressed with FAT 32. The cluster sizes in FAT 32 are much smaller, on the basis that 2³² can address a much higher number of clusters, which allows the size per cluster to be reduced. This in turn allows a more efficient use of disk space. The maximum of 512 files in the root directory limit has been removed, and the indexing system in FAT 32 is far more stable than in FAT 16.

There are numerous other technical improvements in FAT 32 compared to FAT 16. In fact, there are so many changes that Microsoft released a white paper on the topic. Everything from stability through redundancy (for example, FAT 32 contains a second File Allocation Table) to more stable drive mapping can be found in FAT 32.

FAT 32 is supported by Windows 95 Revision B, Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Note that it is not available in the original release of Windows 95 or in Windows NT.

FAT16 1 NTFS v4