FAT32 Summary (update)

There are many file systems on the computer, but they can all be abstracted into four major components: boot block, super block, index node, and data zone.
12, 16, 32 in fat12, fat16, and FAT32 refer to the number of bits in the fat table (the middle and high 4 bits in FAT32 are retained, so the actual valid value is 28bit)
Fat12 only supports dos short file names. Fat16 and FAT32 support both short and long file names (255 characters ). In Linux, fat12 is called the msdos file system, and fat16 and FAT32 are called the vfat file system.
FAT32 is a file system designed by Microsoft and an improvement to fat16. It consists of BDR (equivalent to the boot block and super block), fat table (equivalent to the index node, which is open to question), directory items and file data (equivalent to the data zone ). The boot block is used to guide the operating system. The super block records the basic information of the partition. The index node records the basic information of the files and directories in the partition and the disk space usage. It expands the cluster address in fat16 from 16 to 28, so that the addressing capability of the cluster is from about 2 ^ 16 to 64 K (if a cluster is 32 K, 2g, that is, the partition size cannot exceed 2G !), Scale to about 2 ^ 28, or M cluster. This is more than enough for modern computers. However, in its directory items, the file size is still 4 bytes, which makes FAT32 not support files larger than 4 GB.
One drawback of FAT32 is that it does not support many security features, such as user permissions and access control. It also does not support logs. Another major drawback is that when the partition size is large (more than 32 GB), the fat table will become very bloated. Its Chain-based hard disk space allocation method also makes it inefficient and unstable. After a sudden power failure, file data is often lost. So after the launch of ntfs-3g, Linux on NTFS read and write no longer have any obstacles, I recommend you use efficient and safe NTFS.
However, to be fair, this cannot blame FAT32 because it is improved on the basis of fat16. At that time, no one expected that the hard disk capacity would increase so quickly. As is the popular dos in the 8086 era. In people's opinion at that time, there was more than 1 MB of addressing space, and KB of memory could do anything. Although DOS is a single task and single user, it is adapted to the current PC hardware conditions. This is the dialectics of technological development.
Many errors have occurred in the original text. Thanks to the kghost reminder, We have corrected the problem. If the error persists, please correct it.