Disk file formatting for the PS3 discussion

[jon s]

Originally Posted by blubb

The max file size of FAT32 is 4GB, not 2GB.

NTFS is not an open format and can not be easily supported by anyone but MS.

Actually, FAT32 is a very confusing format.

Microsoft designed Windows XP, 2000 to allow only a FAT32 partition up to a maximun of 32GB in a move to force users to migrate to their NTFS file system, but Windows 95/98 originally supported a 127GB FAT32 partition.

Technically, FAT32 supports a total of approximately 268,435,456 (228) clusters, allowing for drive sizes in the range of 8 terabytes with 32K clusters, but the boot sector of a hard drive uses a 32 bit field that limits volume size to 232 sectors (2TB on a hard disk with 512 byte sectors) As mentioned earlier, tho, there is a limit on each file of 4GB (minus one byte). A big issue with FAT file systems is that it takes a long time to determine free space as it must look thru the entire FAT linearly.

Typical of Microsoft, they design something that looks great on paper only to screw up the implementation (X-Box 360 anyone?).