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For all the quirks and facepalms to be found in the FAT logic, I have to give credit to the staying power of FAT, and its universal compatibility. Its relative
by dmitrybrant 8y ago
For all the quirks and facepalms to be found in the FAT logic, I have to give credit to the staying power of FAT, and its universal compatibility. Its relative simplicity makes it perfectly adequate as the default filesystem for short-term storage (e.g. USB flash drives) where things like resilience and journaling are not an absolute necessity.
- aboutruby 8y agoIts 4GB max file size was a pretty big problem near its end of life.
- kikoreis 8y agoApart from media files, where does that limit really hurt?
- devnonymous 8y agoBackups ..or generically tarballs/zips/..etc. There have been way too many times I've had to split zips/tarballs etc just to copy over stuff over a fat formatted usb disk. Of course I no longer do that but there was a brief period when this was a problem.
- reaperducer 8y agoI remember back in Commodore days, ARC or LHARC, or one of the archiving programs had the ability to span 1541 disks. But I can't remember why that was necessary. Under what circumstances was I moving files around that were 3x the size of the computer's memory?
- anyfoo 8y agoGood question. Even for programs and games that spanned multiple disk, you’d explicitly arrange the data so that it makes sense (sometimes even duplicating some of it), and not just uniformly spread it across all the disks. I can’t remember a single instance where there was the concept of a file that spanned multiple disks on the C64. In theory, the hard drive add ons might have lead to the use of such files (they don’t have to fit into memory at once, you can just seek within the file), but given their relatively low popularity, that was probably very rare, if there was any support for such files in software at all...
- tracker1 8y agoWish there were a FUSE for windows... I mostly format external drives as NTFS as it's easier to get support on mac and linux than anything else in windows.
- virusduck 8y agoScientific datasets, for one.
- blattimwind 8y ago> universal compatibility Afaik all operating systems read and write UDF formatted sticks and UDF is quite simple as well, and has none of the limitations FAT has. Also no patents.
- oarsinsync 8y agoI had never heard of this, and you are indeed right! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format#Compatibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Disk_Format#Compatib... Frustratingly, neither Windows nor Mac exposes the options to format a disk in this way in their GUIs, but it can be done via the CLI in both cases!