The largest drive supported by the FAT filesystem is 2 GB.
FAT32 (File Allocation Table, 32-bit)
Designed to overcome the 2 GB partition limit with the FAT system,
FAT32 is supported by every version of Windows since Windows 95
OSR2. Today, it??™s used mostly for flash memory cards larger than 2 GB,
and on older PCs running Windows 98 and Windows Me. In addition
to the support for larger drives, it also supports smaller file clusters (see
the upcoming ???Understanding Cluster Sizes??? sidebar), so it stores information
more efficiently than FAT.
NTFS (NT Filesystem)
NTFS, designed from the ground up to completely replace FAT/FAT32, is
the default filesystem on all Vista PCs. (Specifically, Vista supports NTFS
version 3.1.) It offers security features like encryption and permissions (see
Chapter 8), compression, and quotas. It??™s typically faster and more reliable
than FAT/FAT32, and supports drives up to 2 terabytes in size.
If Windows Vista is the only operating system on your computer, you
should be using NTFS??”no question. The only compelling reason to use
another filesystem is if you have a dual-boot setup with a very old version of
Windows, in which case you??™d need to choose a filesystem recognized by all
operating systems on your computer. Table 5-2 shows which filesystems are
supported by all recent versions of Microsoft Windows.
* There??™s actually a fourth type, CDFS, used by CD-ROMs.
Table 5-2. Filesystems supported by recent versions of Windows
FAT FAT32 NTFS
Windows Vista (data only) (data only) (v3.
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