FAT vs FAT32

[Zxian]

Maybe this is in the right section, maybe not.

I'm wondering if there's any performance difference between formatting my USB flash drive with FAT16 vs FAT32. I found this article describing file sizes and limits, and I don't think I'd run into the limitations of FAT16.

I'd just like to know if one allows for faster access than the other on a flash drive.

Cheers!

Edited July 27, 2005 by Zxian

[rendrag]

i'm fairly certain you wouldn't really see any difference using fat32 vs fat16 on a usb drive. I think the main reason companies use fat16 is so older OS's can use the drive.

You could always try it and let us know

I think the USB2 speed (480Mbits) is the bottleneck, not so much the file system.

[Zxian]

Yeah, I thought that the bottleneck would be the media access speed (which isn't actually 480Mb/s).

I don't have the problem of older OSes either (oldest thing I touch is Win2K ).

[Martin Zugec]

AFAIR only reason to not use Fat32 is when you want to boot from usb flash disk...

[jaclaz]

AFAIR only reason to not use Fat32 is when you want to boot from usb flash disk...

Actually it all depends on motherboards BIOS, see here:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=12810&hl=

@zxian

FAT16 is MORE efficient that FAT32 on smaller volumes, see here:

http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm

The bottleneck is NOT the USB2 bus speed, but the read/write speed of the Flash DiIsk memory or of the controller chip, i.e. an USB hard disk will normally be FASTER than an USB flashdisk on the same machine.

See here for performance comparison of different USB flashdisks:

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/flashd...wen-xmicro.html

jaclaz

Edited July 28, 2005 by jaclaz

[Zxian]

Thanks for the info people. FAT16 it is.