I rarely read The Register. Is that the usual tone -- as if the author wishes they were Lady Whistledown, the gossip writer on Bridgerton?
It is, it's similar to Private Eye in the UK or
Le Canard enchaîné in France.
The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
31–40 of 75 posts
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#32I rarely read The Register. Is that the usual tone -- as if the author wishes they were Lady Whistledown, the gossip writer on Bridgerton?
Yes, pretty much.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#33TL;DR: "simple lack of foresight combined with the age-old problem of the temporary solution becoming de-facto permanent"
More directly: He only expected his code to be used in Windows NT and made the fatal flaw of thinking that just because he slapped it together in an hour it would be easy for someone to rewrite in the next version of Windows to up the limit.
Instead the code sat untouched for decades as the limit slowly became more and more unreasonable.
IMHO the real issue is the artificial limit. Instead of straight up disallowing you from creating large filesystems, it should have had a dialog box warning about small files being inefficient but letting you make it anyway.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#34TL;DR: "simple lack of foresight combined with the age-old problem of the temporary solution becoming de-facto permanent"
Exactly. Just another case of "640K should be enough for anybody". But we have to admit that storage has leapt hugely in size and very rapidly . In 1990 or thereabouts, a common hard disk size was about 30 megabytes. Today I have files that are many times that size, and we think that that is quite normal. A mere five or so years later around 1996, that size had jumped to 4000 megabytes! These days my laptop has 6 mil…
He had already seen exponential growth in storage capacity and could easily extrapolate from that. Moore's law was coined in the '60s, after all.
This wasn't a lack of foresight, this was being prudent. If I can't come close to testing an upper limit, it's correct to acknowledge it may degrade in a way I haven't anticipated.
Especially since he was writing a GUI which should generally avoid handing users footguns, and which can be updated over time.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#35I rarely read The Register. Is that the usual tone -- as if the author wishes they were Lady Whistledown, the gossip writer on Bridgerton?
Maybe with a little Variety mixed in, but you're not far off the mark. Definitely in the standard British vein of snarky tabloid writing.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#36He made a decision and assumed when making future NT versions this would be revised and updated with the times. I can only image that future teams looked at this and thought "someone chose 32GB for a reason, better not change it"...
Well, Windows 95/98/ME, 2000 and XP shared the same old font installer that Windows 3.11 . I wonder why no body changed it before.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a single file that is 6 million megabytes in size.
who/what reads that file?
I haven't managed a 6TB file before, but I did have a >100GB log file I ended up parsing with awk just to be sure that the memory consumption on the consuming process wouldn't go crazy.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#38He made a decision and assumed when making future NT versions this would be revised and updated with the times. I can only image that future teams looked at this and thought "someone chose 32GB for a reason, better not change it"...
Well, Windows 95/98/ME, 2000 and XP shared the same old font installer that Windows 3.11 . I wonder why no body changed it before.
Likely if it ain't broke don't fix it.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, this only applies to systems that actually have this (i.e. they were updated after exFAT released or released after and included this update). There will be sadly many systems that will never receive this update. But for a fun fact, if you see many embedded systems that say they can only support an SD card up to 32 GB, it is a soft limitation due to the fact that media over 32 GB are pre-formatted to e…
FAT32 only supports 4GB files though, so not sure how useful this is for a lot of media usecases.
At one point, that was more than enough to store DVD rips.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#40TIL: In 2019, Microsoft released the exFAT [1] specs to a large group of vendors [2], including prominent Linux vendors. I.e. exFAT should now be preferred over FAT/NTFS for media used across different operating systems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Invention_Network
Huh, I thought exFAT was much older, not 2019.