Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 13 Feb 2006 02:07:01 +0100 | From | Nicolas George <> | Subject | Re: Filesystem for mobile hard drive |
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Le quartidi 24 pluviôse, an CCXIV, Phillip Susi a écrit : > If by FAT you mean FAT16, then yes, you have an 8 GB limit for the > entire filesystem. Fat32 on the other hand, can handle much more and so > should be suitable in this aspect.
According to Wikipedia, and what I knew besides, FAT32 has a limit of 2 To for the whole filesystem. But the limit I was talking of is the file size limit: 4 Go perfile. Which is, nowadays, a bit short: an ISO image for a DVD-R does not fit, for example.
> Fragmentation is also a property not > of the filesystem, but of Microsoft's filesystem drivers. I'm fairly > sure that the linux fat implementations do not use absurdly stupid > allocation algorithms that lead to lots of fragmentation.
I am not sure about that: you can not do really good algorthms on bad data structures, and the data structures of FAT do not provide any support to do smart allocation.
> This can be overcome with the UDF filesystem by using the uid and gid > mount options, allowing the files to appear to be owned by the correct > local user.
That is interesting. Do you know how efficient UDF is compared to others filesystems on normal hard drives? It is optimized for CDs and DVDs, I would not be surprised if the performances were poor on different supports.
> It would be nice if the other filesystems were patched to > allow such options as well.
I believe that such options should not be done on a per-filesystem basis. Something in the common code of the VFS would be more logical.
> Network filesystems are not on disk filesystems, so they have nothing to > do with this discussion; you can't format a disk as "nfs" or "smb".
The idea was to mount the disk with its haphazard UIDs, and then export it and mount it as a network filesystem over the loopback. By itself, it is absolutely useless, but networked filesystems have UIDs mapping facilities.
Regards,
-- Nicolas George [unhandled content-type:application/pgp-signature] | |