Re: Partition table sux
Marc Mutz (Marc@Mutz.com)
Fri, 23 Jul 1999 20:54:36 +0200
Riley Williams wrote:
>
> Hi David.
>
> >> Once 2 TB looked almost infinitely large, but today 100 GB is
> >> quite common, and we can expect that very soon this 2 TB will be
> >> a real limit. In other words, this old ugly DOS-type partition
> >> table will have to be replaced.
>
> > At last ! It really sux.
>
> Do you really believe that M$ will allow it to go away? In my opinion,
> they're too committed to backwards-compatibility for that.
>
> What I *CAN* see happenning is for FAT28/32 (whatever) getting larger
> clusters for the FAT to refer to, thus pushing that limit upwards as
> well. Here's my calculations relating to this:
>
<snipped FAT part. size breakdown>
>
> Either way, the limit is considerably higher than the 2 Terabytes
> mentioned in the original postee's message.
>
1.) The original poster was talking about the DOS partition table, not
max. size of filesystems. As a solution to that: with Linux supporting
so many partitioning formats, there must be one that supports more than
2TB?
2.) AFAICR from my Atari days, FAT12/16 had _many_ (ie. more than
necessary) 'reserved cluster numbers', indiating end of FAT chain or
defect clusters. I wonder if the missing 4 bits are dedicated to this
purpose?
Marc
--
Marc Mutz <Marc@Mutz.com> http://marc.mutz.com/
Unversity of Bielefeld, Dep. of Mathematics / Dep. of Physics
PGP-keyID's: 0xd46ce9ab (RSA), 0x7ae55b9e (DSS/DH)
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