The 24-bit addressing limitation is 8.4GB.
The 28-bit addressing limitation is 137.4GB.
48-bit addressing breaks the "barrier", and theoretically allows the maximum storage limit to be 144 petabytes. It also gives the ability to transfer more than 256 sectors per command (i.e., up to 65,536 sectors per command).
The ANSI T13 Technical Committee developed 48-bit addressing, which is interoperable with the previous 28-bit addressing standard.
There is no actual 32GB limitation with FAT32 partitions. This is <i>only</i> applicable when creating a FAT32 partition with a MS operating system installation CD. Using the FDISK utility on a standard Win9x boot disk, or a utility from a disk manufacturer will allow creation of FAT32 partitions that exceed 32GB on a clean HDD. Partitioning utilities can perform the same procedure from within the GUI.
FAT16 can support 4GB partitions, which can be created with FDISK. But the MS-DOS FAT file system can only support 2GB per partition, so a HDD formatted as FAT16 must have the partitions split into 2GB sections. In other words, if you wish to have a FAT16 drive accessible from MS-DOS or Win95/98 and Windows NT, your partition can be no larger than 2GB.
The maximum partition size of FAT16 under Windows NT is 2GB using 32K clusters, or 4GB using the non-standard 64K clusters that other versions of Windows do not support.
FAT32 supports drives up to 2 terabytes in size ... however, some hard disks may not be able to contain bootable partitions that are larger than 7.8GB because of limitations in the BIOS INT13 interface, which would require flashing to support updated INT13 extensions.
While FAT32 may support partitions of this size, it does so at the cost of tremendous slack waste and an enormous file allocation table.
Note: Original Win98 and Win98SE versions of FDISK cannot fully recognize HDDs that are 64GB or larger. A newer version of FDISK without this limitation can be downloaded <A HREF="http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q263044&" target="_new">here</A>.
Under NTFS, the maximum size of a partition is 2 to the 64th power. This is equal to 16 binary exabytes, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes (18 billion GB).
And so, if you are using NTFS, it should be a while before you encounter a partition size limitation!
Them's the facts, gentlemen. No more guessing.
Toejam31
<font color=red>First Rig:</font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=17935" target="_new"><font color=green>Toejam31's Devastating Dalek Destroyer</font color=green></A>
<font color=red>Second Rig:</font color=red> <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.html?rigid=15942" target="_new"><font color=green>Toey's Dynamite DDR Duron</font color=green></A>
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<font color=purple>"Some push the envelope. Some just lick it. And some can't find the flap."</font color=purple>