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I've got a quirky question for the techno geeks here. Tell me how a 16 GB flash memory stick, which is formatted in FAT 32, does not hit the 4GB addressing wall? My computer sees well over that number in volume space when I plug it into a port. Am I missing something ? If I put 10 GB of mp3 songs on a 16 GB stick and plug it into my car audio, will it only see 4 GB of music?

file systems don't keep track of individual bytes, they keep track of bundles of bytes. called allocation units.

FAT stands for File Allocation Table, which is what it uses to keep track of these allocation units, which range from 512 bytes to 64 kilobytes. The maximum size of the table is around 2 billion entries. Your memory stick is probably using allocation units of 16 kilobytes in size.

How much your audio deck can see is a separate question.

You can't put a single file that is 4GB. But you can have several files that combined are well over 4GB.

According to MS website, the max a FAT32 drive can be is 8TB.

The practical limit of a FAT32 partition is 32 GB because Microsoft OSes after Windows 2000 won't let you format a partition larger than that as a FAT32 because its efficiency drops as it gets larger. The limit you are most likely to encounter in FAT32 is the 4 GB maximum file size limit, which wasn't a problem at the time FAT32 was around because nobody was carting around 50 GB bluray rips back then...

See also: http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm

Ahhhh. Got it. Makes much more sense now. Thanks.

It also means that a 1k file saved on that disk, will take 16k in space…assuming flip is correct.

This will probably limit the number of files you can have on that disk. (not the total volume, of those files)

Example a 17k file will take 32k of space.

I think what matters most is what your gonna use the drive for. If your using it to flash the bios, partition, anything under the hood, you will want to format it Fat32. If just using it for storage, format ntfs. Linux aside.

exFAT is a third option generally superior to NTFS for flash drives. Mac OSX can use it, Microsoft patched Windows XP with an exFAT driver so it will work in virtually any Windows machine. Linux support is toast though since Microsoft patented it.

flip wrote:I think what matters most is what your gonna use the drive for. If your using it to flash the bios, partition, anything under the hood, you will want to format it Fat32. If just using it for storage, format ntfs. Linux aside.

This particular drive I want to use for storing mp3's on is for my car audio system, which has a USB port for Bluetooth, Flash Memory or an iPod type device. This particular audio system will only play either mp3's or WMA files from a flash memory stick that is formatted in FAT 32, not NTFS. Otherwise, I would use NTFS for storage. Since this particular SanDisk stick already comes formatted in FAT 32, I don't have to reformat for use in my car audio. Convenient.

I tried it out the other day and even those mp3's I converted (thanks for the foobar2000 recommendation on converting files Krom) from my stored .wav files sounded pretty decent.

Yeah, foobar is pretty much unbeatable for converting / mass tagging / mass renaming audio files. I recently upgraded my computer and foobars conversion speed scaled up right along with it, it went from 70x playback speed on the old dual core to 300x playback speed on the new quad core, so I can now convert an hours worth of music from FLAC to mp3 in about 12 seconds.

Yea, but can it dance…

Krom wrote:Yeah, foobar is pretty much unbeatable for converting / mass tagging / mass renaming audio files. I recently upgraded my computer and foobars conversion speed scaled up right along with it, it went from 70x playback speed on the old dual core to 300x playback speed on the new quad core, so I can now convert an hours worth of music from FLAC to mp3 in about 12 seconds.

Yeah, I was pretty impressed with it too. Much more flexible with converting, tagging and renaming those loads of audio files I've been waiting to do something with and the LAME encoder seems to have done an impressive job with converting the files. The songs sound good for being mp3's when played in my car audio system, even those that have some slight artifacts because they were digitized from some old vinyl records I wanted to listen to a lot.

Spidey wrote:Yea, but can it dance…

It can if it wants to and we can leave its friends behind...