RSP Software

fat16 or only fat is the format used in small hds (30 mb)

fat32 is used in removable media and hds

ntfs is used in the majority of hds

It allows you to pause, resume and cancel the format

You can set the label of drives

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

File Allocation Table or FAT is a computer file system architecture originally developed by Bill Gates and Marc McDonald in 1976/1977.[1][2] It is the primary file system for various operating systems including DR-DOS, OpenDOS, freeDOS, MS-DOS, OS/2(v1.1), and Microsoft Windows (up to Windows Me). For floppy disks (FAT12 and FAT16 without long filename support) it has been standardized as ECMA-107[3] and ISO/IEC 9293.[4][5] The use of long filenames with FAT is patented in part.

The FAT file system is relatively straightforward and is supported by virtually all existing operating systems for personal computers. This makes it an ideal format for solid-state memory cards and a convenient way to share data between operating systems.

Common implementations have a serious drawback in that when files are deleted and new files written to the media, directory fragments tend to become scattered over the entire disk, making reading and writing slower on storage devices, which have lower seek time for random data access (Such as mechanical hard drives). Manually-invoked periodic defragmentation is one solution to this problem, but is often a lengthy process, and unwise in some instances. Due to a limited number of lifetime writes, and their quick access times, solid-state memory cards should usually not be defragmented.

In 1984 IBM released the PC AT, which featured a 20 MB hard disk. Microsoft introduced MS-DOS 3.0 in parallel. Cluster addresses were increased to 16-bit, allowing for up to 65,517 clusters per volume, and consequently much greater file system sizes. However, the maximum possible number of sectors and the maximum (partition, rather than disk) size of 32 MB did not change. Therefore, although technically already "FAT16", this format was not what today is commonly understood as FAT16. A 20 MB hard disk formatted under MS-DOS 3.0 was not accessible by the older MS-DOS 2.0. Of course, MS-DOS 3.0 could still access MS-DOS 2.0 style 8 KB cluster partitions.

MS-DOS 3.0 also introduced support for high-density 1.2 MB 5.25" diskettes, which notably had 15 sectors per track, hence more space for FAT. This probably prompted a dubious optimization of the cluster size, which went down from 2 sectors to just 1. The net effect was that high density diskettes were significantly slower than older double density ones.[dubious – discuss]

Extended partition and logical drives

Apart from improving the structure of the FAT file system itself, a parallel development allowing an increase in the maximum possible FAT size was the introduction of multiple FAT partitions. Originally partitions were supposed to be used only for sharing the disk between operating systems, typically DOS and Xenix at the time, so DOS was only prepared to handle one FAT partition. It was not possible to create multiple DOS partitions using DOS tools, and third party tools would warn that such a scheme would not be compatible with DOS. Simply allowing several identical-looking DOS partitions could lead to naming problems: should C: be the first FAT partition on disk, for simplicity, or rather the partition marked as active in the partition table, so that several DOS versions can co-exist? And which partition should be C: if the system was booted from a diskette?

To allow the use of more FAT partitions in a compatible way, a new partition type was introduced (in MS-DOS 3.2, January 1986), the extended partition; which is a container for additional partitions called logical drives. Originally only one logical drive was possible, permitting hard disks up to 64 MB. In MS-DOS 3.3 (August 1987) this limit was increased to 24 drives; it probably came from the compulsory letter-based disk naming (A and B being reserved for the two floppy drives, with which many, if not most, systems of the era were equipped). Logical drives are described by on-disk structures which closely resemble the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the disk (which describes the primary partitions), likely to simplify the implementation. Though some believe these partitions were nested in a way analogous to Russian matryoshka dolls, that isn't the case. They are stored as a row of separate blocks within a single box; these blocks are often referred to as being chained together, by the links in their extended boot record (EBR) sectors. Only one extended partition is allowed. Logical drives are not bootable, and the extended partition can only be created after the primary FAT partition (except with third party formatting tools), which remove all ambiguity, but also the possibility of booting several DOS versions from the same hard disk.

A useful side-effect of the extended partition scheme was to significantly increase the maximum number of partitions possible on a PC hard disk beyond the four which could be described by the MBR alone.

Prior to the introduction of extended partitions, some hard disk controllers (which at that time were separate option boards, since the IDE standard did not yet exist) could make large hard disks appear as two separate disks.

Finally in November 1987, Compaq DOS 3.31 introduced what is today called the FAT16 format, with the expansion of the 16-bit disk sector count to 32 bits. The result was initially called the DOS 3.31 Large File System. Although the on-disk changes were minor, the entire DOS disk driver had to be converted to use 32-bit sector numbers, a task complicated by the fact that it was written in 16-bit assembly language.

In 1988 the improvement became more generally available through MS-DOS 4.0 and OS/2 1.1. The limit on partition size was dictated by the 8-bit signed count of sectors-per-cluster, which had a maximum power-of-two value of 64. With the standard hard disk sector size of 512 bytes, this gives a maximum of 32 KB clusters, thereby 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 it generated greater internal fragmentation. Windows 98 also supported reading and writing this variant, but its disk utilities did not work with it.

The number of root directory entries available is determined when the volume is formatted, and is stored in a 16-bit signed field setting an absolute limit of 32767 entries (32736, a multiple of 32, in practice). For historical reasons, FAT12 and FAT16 media generally use 512 root directory entries on non-floppy media. Other sizes may be incompatible with some software or devices (entries being file and/or folder names in the original 8.3 format).[10] Some third party tools like mkdosfs allow the user to set this parameter.[11]

Long file names

One of the user experience goals for the designers of Windows 95 was the ability to use long filenames (LFNs—up to 255 UTF-16 code points long), in addition to classic 8.3 filenames. LFNs were implemented using a work-around in the way directory entries are laid out (see below). The version of the file system with this extension is usually known as VFAT after the Windows 95 VxD device driver, also known as "Virtual FAT" in Microsoft's documentation.

Interestingly, the VFAT driver actually appeared before Windows 95, in Windows for Workgroups 3.11, but was only used for implementing 32-bit File Access, a higher performance protected mode file access method, bypassing DOS and directly using either the BIOS, or, better, the Windows-native protected mode disk drivers.

In Windows NT, support for long filenames on FAT started from version 3.5. OS/2 added long filename support to FAT using extended attributes (EA) before the introduction of VFAT; thus, VFAT long filenames are invisible to OS/2, and EA long filenames are invisible to Windows.

In order to overcome the volume size limit of FAT16, while still allowing DOS real mode code to handle the format without unnecessarily reducing the available conventional memory, Microsoft implemented a newer generation of FAT, known as FAT32, with cluster values held in a 32-bit field, of which 28 bits are used to hold the cluster number, for a maximum of approximately 268 million (228) clusters. This allows for drive sizes of up to 8 terabytes with 32KB clusters, but the boot sector uses a 32-bit field for the sector count, limiting volume size to 2 TB on a hard disk with 512 byte sectors.

On Windows 95/98, due to the version of Microsoft's SCANDISK utility included with these operating systems being a 16-bit application, the FAT structure is not allowed to grow beyond around 4.2 million (< 222) clusters, placing the volume limit at 127.53 gigabytes.[12] A limitation in original versions of Windows 98/98SE's Fdisk utility causes it to incorrectly report disk sizes over 64GB.[13] A corrected version is available from Microsoft. These limitations do not apply to Windows 2000/XP except during Setup, in which there is a 32GB limit.[14] Windows Me supports the FAT32 file system without any limits.[15] However, similarly to windows 95/98SE there is no native support for 48bit LBA in Windows ME, meaning that the maximum disk size is 127.6GB

FAT32 was introduced with Windows 95 OSR2, although reformatting was needed to use it, and DriveSpace 3 (the version that came with Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows 98) never supported it. Windows 98 introduced a utility to convert existing hard disks from FAT16 to FAT32 without loss of data. In the NT line, native support for FAT32 arrived in Windows 2000. A free FAT32 driver for Windows NT 4.0 was available from Winternals, a company later acquired by Microsoft. Since the acquisition the driver is no longer officially available.

Windows 2000 and Windows XP can read and write to FAT32 file systems of any size, but the format program included in Windows 2000 and higher can only create FAT32 file systems of 32 GB or less. This limitation is by design and according to Microsoft was imposed because many tasks on a very large FAT32 file system become slow and inefficient.[12][16] This limitation can be bypassed by using third-party formatting utilities or by using the built-in FORMAT.EXE command-line utility.[17][18]

The maximum possible size for a file on a FAT32 volume is 4 GB minus 1 "null" byte (232-1 bytes). Video applications, large databases, and some other software easily exceed this limit. Larger files require another formatting type such as HFS+ or NTFS. Until mid-2006, those who run dual boot systems or who move external data drives between computers with different operating systems had little choice but to stick with FAT32. Since then, full support for NTFS has become available in Linux and many other operating systems, by installing the FUSE library (on Linux) together with the NTFS-3G driver. Data exchange is also possible between Windows and Linux by using the Linux-native ext2 or ext3 file systems through the use of external drivers for Windows, such as ext2 IFS; however, Windows cannot boot from ext2 or ext3 partitions.

Fragmentation

The FAT file system does not contain mechanisms which prevent newly written files from becoming scattered across the partition.[6] Other file systems, like HPFS, use free space bitmaps that indicate used and available clusters, which could then be quickly looked up in order to find free contiguous areas (improved in exFAT). Another solution is the linkage of all free clusters into one or more lists (as is done in Unix file systems). Instead, the FAT has to be scanned as an array to find free clusters, which can lead to performance penalties with large hard disks.

In fact, computing free disk space on FAT is one of the most resource intensive operations, as it requires reading the entire FAT linearly. A possible justification suggested by Microsoft's Raymond Chen for limiting the maximum size of FAT32 partitions created on Windows was the time required to perform a "DIR" operation, which always displays the free disk space as the last line.[16] Displaying this line took longer and longer as the number of clusters increased.

The High Performance File System (HPFS) divides disk space into bands, which have their own free space bitmap, where multiple files opened for simultaneous write could be expanded separately.[6]

Some of the perceived problems with fragmentation resulted from operating system and hardware limitations.

The single-tasking DOS and the traditionally single-tasking PC hard disk architecture (only 1 outstanding input/output request at a time, no DMA transfers) did not contain mechanisms which could alleviate fragmentation by asynchronously prefetching next data while the application was processing the previous chunks.

Similarly, write-behind caching was often not enabled by default with Microsoft software (if present) given the problem of data loss in case of a crash, made easier by the lack of hardware protection between applications and the system.

MS-DOS also did not offer a system call which would allow applications to make sure a particular file has been completely written to disk in the presence of deferred writes (cf. fsync in Unix or DosBufReset in OS/2). Disk caches on MS-DOS were operating on disk block level and were not aware of higher-level structures of the file system. In this situation, cheating with regard to the real progress of a disk operation was most dangerous.

Modern operating systems have introduced these optimizations to FAT partitions, but optimizations can still produce unwanted artifacts in case of a system crash. A Windows NT system will allocate space to files on FAT in advance, selecting large contiguous areas, but in case of a crash, files which were being appended will appear larger than they were ever written into, with dozens of random kilobytes at the end.

With the large cluster sizes, 16 or 32K, forced by larger FAT32 partitions, the external fragmentation becomes somewhat less significant, and internal fragmentation, ie. disk space waste (since files are rarely exact multiples of cluster size), starts to be a problem as well, especially when there are a great many small files.

Third party support

Other IBM PC operating systems—such as Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS and JNode—have all supported FAT, and most added support for VFAT, FAT32, JFAT shortly after the corresponding Windows versions were released. Early Linux distributions also supported a format known as UMSDOS, which was FAT with Unix file attributes (such as long file name and access permissions) stored in a separate file called “--linux-.---”. UMSDOS fell into disuse after VFAT was released and is not enabled by default in Linux kernels from version 2.5.7 onwards.[19] The Mac OS X operating system also supports the FAT file systems on volumes other than the boot disk. The Amiga supports FAT through the CrossDOS file system.

FAT and Alternate Data Streams

The FAT file system itself is not designed for supporting Alternate Data Streams (ADS), but some operating systems that heavily depend on them have devised various methods for handling them in FAT drives. Such methods either store the additional information in extra files and directories (Mac OS), or give new semantics to previously unused fields of the FAT on-disk data structures (OS/2 and Windows NT). The second design, while presumably more efficient, prevents any copying or backing-up of those volumes using non-aware tools; manipulating such volumes using non-aware disk utilities (e.g. defragmenters or CHKDSK) will probably lose the information.

Mac OS using PC Exchange stores its various dates, file attributes and long filenames in a hidden file called FINDER.DAT, and resource forks (a common Mac OS ADS) in a subdirectory called RESOURCE.FRK, in every directory where they are used. From PC Exchange 2.1 onwards, they store the Mac OS long filenames as standard FAT long filenames and convert FAT filenames longer than 31 characters to unique 31-character filenames, which can then be made visible to Macintosh applications.

Mac OS X stores resource forks and metadata (file attributes, other ADS) in a hidden file with a name constructed from the owner filename prefixed with "._", and Finder stores some folder and file metadata in a hidden file called ".DS Store".

OS/2 heavily depends on extended attributes (EAs) and stores them in a hidden file called "EA DATA. SF" in the root directory of the FAT12 or FAT16 volume. This file is indexed by 2 previously reserved bytes in the file's (or directory's) directory entry. In the FAT32 format, these bytes hold the upper 16 bits of the starting cluster number of the file or directory, hence making it difficult to store EAs on FAT32. Extended attributes are accessible via the Workplace Shell desktop, through REXX scripts, and many system GUI and command-line utilities (such as 4OS2).[20]

To accommodate its OS/2 subsystem, Windows NT supports the handling of extended attributes in HPFS, NTFS, and FAT. It stores EAs on FAT and HPFS using exactly the same scheme as OS/2, but does not support any other kind of ADS as held on NTFS volumes. Trying to copy a file with any ADS other than EAs from an NTFS volume to a FAT or HPFS volume gives a warning message with the names of the ADSs that will be lost.

Windows 2000 onward acts exactly as Windows NT, except that it ignores EAs when copying to FAT32 without any warning (but shows the warning for other ADSs, like "Macintosh Finder Info" and "Macintosh Resource Fork").

Future

Microsoft has recently secured patents for VFAT and FAT32 (but not the original FAT). Despite two earlier rulings against them, Microsoft prevailed and was awarded the patents.

Since Microsoft has announced the discontinuation of its MS-DOS-based consumer operating systems with Windows Me, it remains unlikely that any new versions of FAT will appear. For most purposes, the NTFS file system that was developed for the Windows NT line is superior to FAT from the points of view of efficiency, performance, and reliability; its main drawbacks are the size overhead for small volumes and the very limited support by anything other than the NT-based versions of Windows, since the exact specification is a trade secret of Microsoft. The availability of NTFS-3G since mid 2006 has led to much improved NTFS support in Unix-like operating systems, considerably alleviating this concern. It is still not possible to use NTFS in DOS-like operating systems, which in turn makes it difficult to use a DOS floppy for recovery purposes. Microsoft provided a recovery console to work around this issue, but for security reasons it severely limited what could be done through the Recovery Console by default. The movement of recovery utilities to boot CDs based on BartPE or Linux (with NTFS-3G) is finally eroding this drawback.

FAT is still the normal file system for removable media (with the exception of CDs and DVDs), with FAT12 used on floppies, and FAT16 on most other removable media (such as flash memory cards for digital cameras and USB flash drives). Most removable media are not yet large enough to benefit from FAT32, although some larger flash drives, like SDHC, do make use of it. FAT16 is used on these drives for reasons of compatibility and size overhead.

The FAT32 formatting support in Windows 2000 and XP is limited to volumes of 32 GB, which effectively forces users of modern hard drives either to use NTFS, to partition the drive into smaller volumes (below 32 GB), or to format the drive using third party tools.

exFAT

Main article: exFAT
exFAT is an incompatible replacement for FAT file systems that was introduced with Windows Embedded CE 6.0. It is intended to be used on flash drives, where FAT is used today. Windows XP file system drivers will be offered by Microsoft shortly after the release of Windows CE 6.0[citation needed], while Windows Vista Service Pack 1 added exFAT support to Windows Vista.[21] exFAT introduces a free space bitmap allowing faster space allocation and faster deletes, support for files up to 264 bytes, larger cluster sizes (up to 32 MB in the first implementation), an extensible directory structure and name hashes for filenames for faster comparisons. It does not have short 8.3 filenames anymore. It does not appear to have security access control lists or file system journaling like NTFS, though device manufacturers can choose to implement simplified support for transactions (backup file allocation table used for the write operations, primary FAT for storing last known good allocation table).

NTFS is the standard file system of Windows NT, including its later versions Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, and Windows 7.[4]
NTFS supersedes the FAT file system as the preferred file system for Microsoft’s Windows operating systems. NTFS has several improvements over FAT and HPFS (High Performance File System) such as improved support for metadata and the use of advanced data structures to improve performance, reliability, and disk space utilization, plus additional extensions such as security access control lists (ACL) and file system journaling.

Read more about NTFS on Wikipedia

Operating System Compliance

Windows NT 4.0 , Windows 2000 , Windows XP , Vista

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