Speaking in a non-academic language, a file system is how data is stored and structured on some kind of storage medium (hard disk of a computer, diskette, internal memory of a phone or camera, etc.). Those. the concept of a file system includes such components as the organization, structure, and naming order of information. In other words, the file system of a computer (more precisely, of a particular disk or storage medium) is what allows an application to access files on this storage medium without paying attention to the physical type of such storage medium and the logic of the location of the requested information on it. All that the program “knows” is the name of the requested file and, possibly, a set of its additional attributes. But it depends on how quickly and accurately the program receives the requested information from the file system and system driver.
The fat32 file system is one of the oldest file systems used in modern computers. By the way, contrary to popular belief, she is younger than her main competitor - the NTFS file system (dates of appearance - respectively, 1996 and 1993). This file system survived its dawn between 1997 and 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 under the MS DOS operating system and some others worked. The new file system differs from its predecessor in a number of important improvements:
- The maximum file size has been increased from 2 to 4 GB;
- the maximum theoretical volume size was increased from 4 GB (in practice - 2 GB) to 8 TB (in practice - no more than 2 TB, or even less, but still, for 1996 - more than enough).
Very simplified, the fat32 file system is a large table that contains information about each cluster (the minimum amount of storage space that can be allocated for information storage). Actually, fat is decrypted - “file allocation table”, that is, “file allocation table”. About each cluster, the table may contain the following information:
- free;
- busy, but not the last cluster of a file;
- busy, and at the same time is the last cluster of the file;
- damaged (data cannot 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 80s and early 90s, this was enough to satisfy the basic needs of most users.
Fat32 lost the “arms race” with the NTFS file system for several reasons. Firstly, at the beginning of the zero years of our century, Windows XP, for which NTFS was the native file system, gained great popularity. When installing "OSes", many users agreed with the proposal to format the system partition into a new operating system, without even realizing the advantages or disadvantages of this action. Secondly, fat32 failed a limited maximum file size. It was no longer possible to store the image of your favorite DVD or a favorite game on your hard drive. Thirdly, the NTFS file system, which was created for the network and server operating systems, was originally incorporated the possibility of more advanced management of access rights to information, as well as a greater margin of safety from data corruption than fat32, which, in fact, was a deep upgrade file system of the 70s.
But there remains one class of devices in which the position of the "old" fat32 is even stronger than that of NTFS. These are removable flash drives and flash cards. Due to the greater complexity of internal organization, the NTFS file system works slower with already leisurely removable media. Moreover, the success of fat32 in this segment was so great that Microsoft in 2008 was forced to introduce the next 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 free from the many flaws inherent in fat32. But the story about her is a completely different story.