msdosfs vs 250Gb hard disk

[Daniel O'Connor]

On Fri, 2 May 2003 13:24, David Schultz wrote:
> Most filesystems have a unique identifier associated with every
> file, but msdosfs does not.  The FreeBSD driver invents inumbers
> on the fly as the index of the directory entry for the file,
> assuming that the entire disk is full of directory entries.  These
> numbers are 32 bits and they need to be persistent, so it would
> not be possible to play any clever tricks with the math.

I don't think FAT32 can have 4 billion files..? I understand your point about 
the limitations of the inode number synthesiser, but I was hoping someone 
with more knowledge of how FAT works to be able to give some hints :) :)

> I suggest that you ensure that all of your FAT32 filesystems are
> smaller than 128GB (2^32 * 32 bytes/direntry).  Note that msdosfs
> performance and reliability generally sucks, so unless you're
> using the disk merely as a buffer to transfer stuff between
> operating systems, you probably want to rethink your decision.

Yeah, I realise it's perfomance suck, but we ARE using it to transfer data 
between multiple OSen :)
I have just worked around it with <128Gb partitions for the moment.

-- 
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 9A8C 569F 685A D928 5140  AE4B 319B 41F4 5D17 FDD5