John R Pierce wrote: > >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAT32 claims 4GB filesize, and 8TB partition >> size. the 32GB partition limit is a WinXP-ism to make people use NTFS. >> > > a 300 Gb fat32 would have either an obscenely large fat table, or an > obscenely large cluster size. if you used 4k clusters, each 'fat' > table would be 300 megabytes, this has to be sequentially scanned to > calcuate freespace, and it has to be scanned to find free blocks for > file and directory allocations. If you used 32k byte clusters, this > would be reduced to 37 megabytes for the FAT, but then even the tiniest > files would waste 32 k bytes. > > FAT also has no support for file ownership or access rights. It has no > journaling, so any abnormal events such as unexpected/sudden reboots > WILL result in lost freespace (orphaned files/fragments), AND its prone > to crosslinking which is very hard to repair. FAT was designed for > floppy disks and hard disks that were a few megabytes back in the early > 80s. It has no way of grouping cluster allocations together, so it has > a very strong tendancy to extreme fragmentation, and as the FAT tables > are quite large on a filesystem this size, requires frequent extra seeks > to locate the next block. 4GB is an absolute limit on size of a single > file (so, no DVD ISO images, no large TARs, etc). Directories are > sequentially scanned only, so large directories that spill over a few > clusters become excruciatingly slow to even open files from. All goo information. I'm probably going to keep Ext3 on the 2 80GB server drives, with Ext2IFS loaded on the W2K install of the server. Probably have an 80GB FAT32 partition on the external drive. I suppose I could also then 2 other 80GB partitions on is also, NTFS and Ext3... Anybody confused yet? Basically, I don't want to lose anything to a drive crash... -- --- David Woyciesjes --- ITS Help Desk Support Technician --- Yale University Client Support --- 100 Church Street South, Suite 214 --- New Haven, CT 06519 --- (203) 785-3200