Facing up to Fat-32 facts

By ClockWeb

Fat-32: A new era of hard disk File Allocation
One common question which some readers have raised in the hard disk issue is Fat 32. Here, ClockWeb will explain what it is, how to upgrade to it, and its benefits and pitfalls.
First, the Microsoft DOS system for PC comprises a few components. The first is the master boot record. Next comes the partition table, the root directory and the file allocation table (Fat). Fat allocates space for files in the hard disk and also keeps track of where they are located - like a table of contents. When Fat 16 was introduced many years ago, it could support a hard disk of up to 2 GB. The storage capacities of hard disks then were in megabytes (MB). Today, however, most hard disks have exceeded 2 GB. Hence if you have, say, a 4.3 GB hard disk, you have a problem. Unless, of course, you do not mind splitting (or partitioning) the hard disk into 2 GB portions.

Terabyte Support
Microsoft addressed this issue with the new Fat 32 system in its OEM release of Windows 95 which is not sold but loaded with PC systems. This means that it will only be available to the public with the introduction of Windows 98. Apart from the ability to support hard disks all the way to the maximum theoretical limit of 2 terabytes, Fat 32 has one other very important advantage. It maximises hard disk usage. With the older Fat 16, even if you have just a line of text in your file, it would consume a minimum of 32 KB of your hard disk. With Fat 32, this minimum shrinks to just 4KB. Hence if your hard disk contains lot of small files, Fat 32 will recover a fair amount of hard disk space. For example, when I converted my 1.2 GB hard disk to Fat 32, I recovered almost 400 MB of space.
There are several ways of converting your hard disk to Fat 32 without using Windows 98. PowerQuest's Partition Magic is one. Another is QuarterDeck's PartitionIt. There are, however, several caveats. Firstly, MS-DOS 6.22 and below, and Windows NT will not read Fat 32 partitions. Microsoft has hinted that the new Windows NT 5.0 will not support it either. The same applies for booting into the previous versions of MS-DOS operation at Windows 95 startup screen. Next on the incompatibility list is older software programs that dig deep into the operating system like Norton Utilities version 1.0 and version 2.0. But the latest version 3.0 have been written specially to take advantage of it.

Not Old BIOS
One other problem arising from Fat 32 is that every file has a limit of 4 GB. Another issue, although not related to the Fat 32 issue, is the BIOS in your PC. Older 486 machines and some early Pentiums are shipped with motherboards that do not support hard disks above 512 MB. One way to overcome this problem is to insert a PowerBIOS card. Lastly, there have been fears that Fat 32 will slow performance compared to Fat 16. Benchmarks have shown that there is a slight decrease in speed.

Microsoft's technical note stated that there might be some performance hit if the program performs large sequential reads and writes While many PC users wait for Windows 98, others had gone ahead for alternatives. It is not a question to upgrade or not, but when it will be avaliable.