New Commodore 64 is Finally Here--For Real! PC MAG Snip

[Jim Brain]

On 1/1/2016 2:36 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
> On Fri, 1 Jan 2016, Chuck Guzis wrote:
>> I've seen this on digicams with CF cards. 2GB is the "official" limit 
>> to FAT16 filesystems.  However, XP and later can format 4GB cards to 
>> FAT16 as well--and it seems to work very well with my older cameras, 
>> which do not understand FAT32.
>
> While, at the time, 2G seemed "infinite", even then, I was amused at 
> the 2G limitation being due to the use of a SIGNED 32 bit number.  The 
> size can be anywhere from -2147483648 to 2147483647.
> By switching to an UNSIGNED 32, NT and the like made the limit 4G.
>
I think it was actually the sectors per cluster number, which was -64 to 
63, I believe and then got changed to 0-128, meaning cluster sizes of 
128 512-byte sectors, or 64K clusters

I know folks will hate on the format, but I am extremely impressed with 
the FAT format.  To go all the way from floppies to 4TB drives is 
impressive.

Jim




-- 
Jim Brain
brain at jbrain.com
www.jbrain.com