On 09/11/06, Herbert Graf wrote: > On Thu, 2006-11-09 at 15:12 +0100, Peter Bindels wrote: > > There are technical reasons they should strongly disrecommend FAT. But > > Strongly? FAT32 has it's problems, but in the consumer space it's > perfectly fine. The ONLY noticeable problem I can think of is the max > file size limit is "only" 2GB (technically 4GB but most FAT32 routines > are limited to 2GB). The only reason this has become an issue recently > is because of DVD images. For most people it's a non issue since most > tools will automatically by default split big images into <2GB chunks. > > Even on a system WITH NTFS I've had problems with some software not > being able to handle 2GB+ files, so the limit is often in more then just > the file system. > > Some people report alot of stability problems with FAT32, but I've never > had an issue. Seeks on a FAT32 disk are, if you cache the entire FAT table, linear in time depending on the file position. The file system has no support for avoiding fragmentation and thereby requires defragmentation. Using a FAT disk in memory only for a 250GB disk (pretty common today) with 4K clusters would take 250MB of memory just for the FAT table, ignoring that you might need to update the second FAT table as well. Updating the file system is highly nontrivial to get right and if interrupted, commonly results in parts being lost, disk space being lost or the entire file system ending up in a state of limbo, that is not discovered until everything goes down by it. The file system structures are outdated, even by 1980's technology, are dog slow, assume failures are spread-out, have a lot of single points of failure (boot sector, a single sector in the FAT failing, bootup code that's not dynamic), and to top it all off, it supports Unicode and afaik also combining unicode sequences, so if somebody adds two files, one with an i in the name one with a Turkish i (without dot) and a combiner that puts a dot on it, you get two files with the exact same name that coexist. Not to mention that you can't find the second file, you can't create directories of certain arbitrary names, you can't rename files to lower-case in Windows since it thinks you didn't change the name, and you can get into trouble if it somehow screws up anyway. I've had a directory with a backslash in the name. Can't delete it in any way I've tried. And for a nice flavor, you can't even support it without patent trouble. That's a five-minute summary of my recent trouble with it. NTFS fixes a lot of these problems introducing other problems. > Why? We are talking about the consumer space. It's a space where a file > system choice rarely presents any problems to the user. Consumer space chooses NTFS because windows tells you to, HFS because MacOS tells you to (not sure on this one), Ext3 or Reiser because your Linux distro tells you to and ignore the rest. They're not the best choices, however, as people will learn later on, but they won't be able to tell why the rest could be better. > As an aside, I've yet again been tremendously annoyed by Mickeysoft. > Just got the latest update for my Xbox360. It promised "streaming video > support from a WindowsXP machine running WMP11". GREAT, I thought. > > So, I installed WMP11 on my only windows machine in the home, connected > my X360 and everything looked great, pictures worked, music worked. Then > I tried videos. Even though I had about 40 videos in the "library", none > showed up on the X360. Tried a bunch of things. On a hunch, I downloaded > one of the WMV format HDTV demos files from Mickeysoft's website. The > X360 now showed ONE video, that wmv file. It looks like it ONLY supports > WMV files, great if that's what you've got, BAD if you don't have a > SINGLE video in that format (all the videos I have are either MPG from > my camera, or re-encoded as Xvid). Guess I'll stick with my $70 Divx > capable media player. > > I understand Mickeysoft wants to be more like Sony, but this is NOT the > way to go IMHO. They've turned a potentially wonderful feature into a > useless waste of time and space. > > Makes me even happier I didn't actually pay for my X360, because if I > had I would be much more ticked. Just wanted to give a heads up to > others out there. Risking a mark of [OT], Microsoft wants you to conform to everything they have, so you'll spend more money on their products to keep using what you've made yourself. It's a business model. Sony just tries to keep both halves of the market (consumers and suppliers) equally supported and tries to keep everything under covers that the other half doesn't like. They sell CD burners and copy protection schemes, support DAE and rootkits to prevent you from using it. Regards, Peter -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist