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SubjectRe: Partition table sux
Hi David.

>> Once 2 TB looked almost infinitely large, but today 100 GB is
>> quite common, and we can expect that very soon this 2 TB will be
>> a real limit. In other words, this old ugly DOS-type partition
>> table will have to be replaced.

> At last ! It really sux.

Do you really believe that M$ will allow it to go away? In my opinion,
they're too committed to backwards-compatibility for that.

What I *CAN* see happenning is for FAT28/32 (whatever) getting larger
clusters for the FAT to refer to, thus pushing that limit upwards as
well. Here's my calculations relating to this:

1. FAT28 with 512 byte clusters provides 2^27k of data space max.
That gives 2^7 = 128 Gigabytes max per partition.

2. Based on that, I would foresee the following partition limits per
cluster size applying:

Cluster size Partition Size
~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
0.5 k 128 G
1 k 256 G
2 k 0.5 T 512 G
4 k 1 T
8 k 2 T
16 k 4 T
32 k 8 T
64 k 16 T

3. Alternatively, I can see FAT28 turning into FAT32, which would
provide the following limits:

Cluster size Partition Size
~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
0.5 k 2 T
1 k 4 T
2 k 8 T
4 k 16 T
8 k 32 T
16 k 64 T
32 k 128 T
64 k 256 T

Either way, the limit is considerably higher than the 2 Terabytes
mentioned in the original postee's message.

Best wishes from Riley.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| There is something frustrating about the quality and speed of Linux |
| development, ie., the quality is too high and the speed is too high, |
| in other words, I can implement this XXXX feature, but I bet someone |
| else has already done so and is just about to release their patch. |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
* ftp://ftp.MemAlpha.cx/pub/rhw/Linux
* http://www.MemAlpha.cx/kernel.versions.html


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