Differences between version 10 and previous revision of FileAllocationTable.
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| Newer page: | version 10 | Last edited on Wednesday, February 11, 2004 1:28:20 pm | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 9 | Last edited on Wednesday, October 8, 2003 9:15:35 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
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It is also a synonym for the FileSystem family that uses it.
This is the only type of FileSystem supported by [MS-DOS] and the [MS-DOS] based [Windows] versions. It went through several iterations as typical capacity of storage media increased, each named after the bit size of an array entry in the [FAT]: [FAT12], [FAT16], [FAT32]. It has several design flaws that have a severe negative impact on performance and, worse, reliability.
-[FAT] has been deprecated by MicrosoftCorporation. Since it has no provisions to store per-user permissions, [NTFS] has always been the default for the [Windows] NT line of OperatingSystems
. Now that the NT descendant [Windows] 2000 has obsoleted the [MS-DOS] based [Windows] flavours, everyone is recommended to use that.
+[FAT] has been deprecated by MicrosoftCorporation. Since it has no provisions to store per-user permissions, [NTFS] has always been the default for the [Windows] NT line of [OperatingSystem]s
. Now that the NT descendant [Windows] 2000 has obsoleted the [MS-DOS] based [Windows] flavours, everyone is recommended to use that.
!!! Structure of the FileAllocationTable
The [FAT] is organized as an array as large as there are clusters on the disk, each entry in the array storing the number of a DiskCluster which contains the next piece of a file. This way, the FileSystem driver can "hop" from cluster to cluster, collecting the pieces of the file. In the original 12-bit version, [FAT12], each entry can have one of the following values:
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# It is often far away from the data itself, so serving it from the [Cache] saves ''huge'' amounts of HardDisk head movements.
Beware though: running the [Cache] in WriteBack mode will further jeopardize the reliability of the already fragile [FAT]. Your best bet is to stick to WriteThrough.
-Also, __never__ leave the disk [Cache] active while running system maintenance utilities such as a defragmentation tool.
+Also, __never__ leave the disk [Cache] active while running system maintenance utilities such as a
