The root directory of a FAT32 drive is now an ordinary cluster chain, so it can be arbitrarily larger and located anywhere on the drive. The boot record on FAT32 drives was expanded to include a backup of critical data structures, so they are less susceptible to a single point of failure. FAT32 can relocate the root directory and use the backup copy of the FAT instead of the default copy. As you can see, a 32 GB drive or larger supports the same cluster size as FAT16. The below table demonstrates the cluster size for various sizes of hard drives. How to determine the version of Windows on a computer.įAT32 provides the below enhancements over previous implementations of the FAT tile system:įAT32 uses space more efficiently with smaller clusters (e.g., 4 kb clusters for drives up to 8 GB in size), resulting in up to 5% more efficient use of disk space relative to large FAT drives.System Requirements: FAT32 cannot be downloaded and is only available with Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows 98. FAT32 is an enhancement of the FAT file system that supports larger hard drives with improved disk space efficiency. FAT currently can support a single disk volume up to 2 Gigabytes in size. With new generations of large hard drives, the existing FAT data structures has reached the limit of their ability to support ever-larger media. In 1996, Windows 95 OSR2 came out with FAT32, a new and improved FAT. Although originally intended for floppy disks, FAT was modified to be a fast and flexible system for managing data on both removable and fixed media. The existing FAT (file allocation table) file system was invented in 1977 as a way to store data on floppy disks for Microsoft stand-alone Disk Basic.

Disk utility fat32