Date: Fri, 2 May 2003 16:16:37 +0200 From: "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> To: David Schultz <das@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: msdosfs vs 250Gb hard disk Message-ID: <200305021616.37560.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> In-Reply-To: <20030502112413.GA46200@HAL9000.homeunix.com> References: <1093.128.39.153.23.1051365009.squirrel@cain.gsoft.com.au> <20030502112413.GA46200@HAL9000.homeunix.com>
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On Fri, 2 May 2003 13:24, David Schultz wrote: > Most filesystems have a unique identifier associated with every > file, but msdosfs does not. The FreeBSD driver invents inumbers > on the fly as the index of the directory entry for the file, > assuming that the entire disk is full of directory entries. These > numbers are 32 bits and they need to be persistent, so it would > not be possible to play any clever tricks with the math. I don't think FAT32 can have 4 billion files..? I understand your point about the limitations of the inode number synthesiser, but I was hoping someone with more knowledge of how FAT works to be able to give some hints :) :) > I suggest that you ensure that all of your FAT32 filesystems are > smaller than 128GB (2^32 * 32 bytes/direntry). Note that msdosfs > performance and reliability generally sucks, so unless you're > using the disk merely as a buffer to transfer stuff between > operating systems, you probably want to rethink your decision. Yeah, I realise it's perfomance suck, but we ARE using it to transfer data between multiple OSen :) I have just worked around it with <128Gb partitions for the moment. -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 9A8C 569F 685A D928 5140 AE4B 319B 41F4 5D17 FDD5
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