Limitations of FAT and ISO9660
As a information exchange format, FAT has these limitations:
- The maximum file size is 4GB minus 1 byte, a serious limitation for video files.
- The maximum volume size Windows XP can format is 32GB, very small
compared to many removable hard drives.
- Maximum about 4 millions files per volume.
- Maximum 65,534 files per directory.
- Does not support symbolic links.
- Does not support hard links.
- Does not support sparse files.
- Does not support many attributes such as permission.
- Does not support extended attributes.
- Does not support long file names and unicode names natively.
- Is not suitable for optical media.
Although ISO9660 (with Joliet extension) was designed for optical media, it
was mainly designed for read only media (CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, etc). It is a
read-only file system. The user is best to prepare all data before writing
anying to the media. Although it has multi-session support that allows it to
add more files later, its space overhead is high.
Last modified: Tue Jul 26 22:09:11 PDT 2005