File system fat32 - a system with an interesting history

If to speak non-academic language, the file system is how data is stored and structured on some storage medium (computer hard drive, floppy disk, internal phone or camera memory, etc.). Those. The concept of the file system includes such components as organization, structure and order of naming information. In other words, the computer's file system (more precisely, a particular disk or information carrier) is what allows an application program to access files on this medium, not paying attention to the physical type of such media and the logic of the information on it. All that the program "knows" is the name of the requested file and, possibly, a set of its additional attributes. But from the file system and the system driver depends how quickly and accurately the program will receive the requested information.

File system fat32 is one of the oldest among the file systems used in modern computers. By the way, contrary to popular belief, it is younger than its main competitor - the NTFS file system (the dates of appearance are, respectively, 1996 and 1993). Its file system experienced its dawn in the period from 1997 to 2001-2003, i.e. At a time when the dominant market was the operating systems Windows 95, 98 and Millennium. The fat32 file system is a further development of the fat16 file system, with which all computers have been running under the MS DOS operating system and some others. From its predecessor, the new file system is characterized by a number of important improvements:

- the maximum file size has been increased from 2 GB to 4 GB;

- The maximum theoretical size of the volume was increased from 4 GB (in practice - 2 GB) to 8 TB (in practice - no more than 2 TB, and even less, but still, for 1996 - more than enough).

Very simplistic fat32 file system is a large table, which contains information about each cluster (the minimum amount of storage space that can be allocated for storing information). Actually, fat is also decrypted - "file allocation table", that is, "file allocation table". About each cluster in the table can contain the following information:

- Free;

- busy, but not the last cluster of a file;

- busy, and at the same time is the last file cluster;

- corrupted (data can not be written to it);

- Reserved by the operating system.

The fat32 file system can assign four attributes to files: hidden, system, archive, and read-only. In the 80's and early 90's this was enough to meet the basic needs of most users.

The "arms race" with the NTFS file system fat32 was lost for several reasons. Firstly, at the beginning of the zero years of this century the OS Windows XP became very popular, for which NTFS was the native file system. Many users at installation "OSes" agreed with the offer to format the system partition in a new operating system, without even imagining the advantages or disadvantages of this action. Secondly, fat32 summed up the limited maximum file size. It was already impossible to store on the hard drive the image of your favorite DVD or the game you liked. Third, the NTFS file system, which was created for the network and server operating systems, initially had the opportunity to improve the management of access rights to information, as well as a greater margin of safety against data corruption than fat32, which in fact was a deep upgrade File system of the 70s.

But there was one class of devices in which the position of the "old woman" fat32 is even stronger than that of NTFS. These are removable flash drives and flash cards. Due to the greater complexity of the internal organization, the NTFS file system runs slower with and so leisurely removable media. And the success of fat32 in this segment was so great that Microsoft in 2008 was forced to introduce the following development of the file systems of the fat family - the exFAT file system, which is positioned as a file system for removable drives with a capacity of 64 GB or more. This new operating system is devoid of many disadvantages inherent in fat32. But the story about her is a completely different story.