Q. Describe the Limitation of FAT16?
DOS designers decided to use clusters with as a minimum four sectors in them (so a cluster size of at least 2KB) for all FAT16 hard disks. That size is enough for any hard disk with less than a 128MB total capacity. Largest logical disk drives which DOS can handle comfortably have capacities up to 2GB. For such a large volume cluster size is 32KB. This means even if a file comprises just a single byte of data writing it to disk uses one whole 32KB region of disk making that area unavailable for any other file's data storage. Most recent solution to these large-disk problems was commenced by Microsoft in its OSR2 release of Windows 95 and it was called as FAT32. Cluster entry for FAT32 employs 32-bit numbers. Minimum size for a FAT32 volume is 512MB. Microsoft has reserved top four bits of each cluster number in a FAT32 file allocation table. Which means that there are just 28-bits for cluster number so maximum cluster number possible is 268,435,456.