Microsoft Wiki

Be sure to join our wiki's Discord server by clicking here
Also follow our wiki's Twitter by clicking here

READ MORE

Microsoft Wiki
Register
Advertisement
File Allocation Table (FAT)
Introduced 1977 with Microsoft BASIC
Partition Identifiers MBR:

FAT12: 0x01

FAT16: 0x04 0x06 0x0E

FAT32: 0x0B 0x0C

GPT:EBD0A0A2-B9E5-4433-87C0-68B6B72699C7

Supported Windows versions All
Developers Microsoft NCR, SCP, IBM, Compaq, Digital Research, Novell, Caldera

The File Allocation Table (FAT) is a proprietary file system developed by Microsoft, NCR, SCP, IBM, Compaq, Digital Research, Novell, and Caldera. It was first introduced in 1977 with Microsoft BASIC. Developed for use on floppy disks, it originally supported 8 bits of data per cluster, each of which could be tagged as a bad block in case of problems with the media. It was later updated for use on hard disks and other devices. It is often supported for compatibility reasons by current operating systems for personal computers and many mobile devices and embedded systems, allowing interchange of data between disparate systems.

Updates[]

Continuing increases in drive capacity required updated variants:

  • FAT12 — 12 bits per cluster, up to 4,068 files
  • FAT16 — 16 bits per cluster, up to 65,460 files
  • FAT32 — 32 bits per cluster, up to 268,173,300 files
  • exFAT — up to 32 MB per cluster, up to 4,294,967,285 files

With Windows NT, FAT32 was replaced by NTFS as the default file system. The Extensible File Allocation Table (exFAT) was intended for removable media.[1]

References[]

  1. What’s the Difference Between FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS? by Chris Hoffman, Hot-To Geek. 2018-03-30.

External links[]


Stub
Stub
This article is a stub, an article too short to provide more than rudimentary information about a subject. You can help the Microsoft Wiki by expanding it.
Advertisement