What is the difference between VFAT and FAT32 file systems

Question

I have searched the internet  but could not find any convincing answers   Are the filesystems VFAT and FAT32 the same  or are there any differences between them

User · Answer

FAT32 along with FAT16 and FAT12 are File System Types  but vfat along with umsdos and msdos are drivers  used to mount the FAT file systems in Linux  The choosing of the driver determines how some of the features are applied to the file system  for example  systems mounted with msdos driver don t have long filenames  they are 8 3 format   vfat is the most common driver for mounting FAT32 file systems nowadays   Source  this wikipedia article  Output of commands like df and lsblk indeed show vfat as the File System Type  But sudo file -sL  dev  lt partition gt  shows FAT  32 bit  if a File System is FAT32   You can confirm vfat is a module and not a File System Type by running modinfo vfat

User · Answer

Copied from http   technet microsoft com en-us library cc750354 aspx     What s FAT       FAT may sound like a strange name for a file system  but it s actually an acronym for File Allocation Table  Introduced in 1981  FAT is ancient in computer terms  Because of its age  most operating systems  including Microsoft Windows NT    Windows 98  the Macintosh OS  and some versions of UNIX  offer support for FAT       The FAT file system limits filenames to the 8 3 naming convention  meaning that a filename can have no more than eight characters before the period and no more than three after  Filenames in a FAT file system must also begin with a letter or number  and they can t contain spaces  Filenames aren t case sensitive       What About VFAT       Perhaps you ve also heard of a file system called VFAT  VFAT is an extension of the FAT file system and was introduced with Windows 95  VFAT maintains backward compatibility with FAT but relaxes the rules  For example  VFAT filenames can contain up to 255 characters  spaces  and multiple periods  Although VFAT preserves the case of filenames  it s not considered case sensitive       When you create a long filename  longer than 8 3  with VFAT  the file system actually creates two different filenames  One is the actual long filename  This name is visible to Windows 95  Windows 98  and Windows NT  4 0 and later   The second filename is called an MS-DOS   alias  An MS-DOS alias is an abbreviated form of the long filename  The file system creates the MS-DOS alias by taking the first six characters of the long filename  not counting spaces   followed by the tilde     and a numeric trailer  For example  the filename Brien s Document txt would have an alias of BRIEN  1 txt       An interesting side effect results from the way VFAT stores its long filenames  When you create a long filename with VFAT  it uses one directory entry for the MS-DOS alias and another entry for every 13 characters of the long filename  In theory  a single long filename could occupy up to 21 directory entries  The root directory has a limit of 512 files  but if you were to use the maximum length long filenames in the root directory  you could cut this limit to a mere 24 files  Therefore  you should use long filenames very sparingly in the root directory  Other directories aren t affected by this limit       You may be wondering why we re discussing VFAT  The reason is it s becoming more common than FAT  but aside from the differences I mentioned above  VFAT has the same limitations  When you tell Windows NT to format a partition as FAT  it actually formats the partition as VFAT  The only time you ll have a true FAT partition under Windows NT 4 0 is when you use another operating system  such as MS-DOS  to format the partition       FAT32      FAT32 is actually an extension of FAT and VFAT  first introduced with Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2  OSR2   FAT32 greatly enhances the VFAT file system but it does have its drawbacks       The greatest advantage to FAT32 is that it dramatically increases the amount of free hard disk space  To illustrate this point  consider that a FAT partition  also known as a FAT16 partition  allows only a certain number of clusters per partition  Therefore  as your partition size increases  the cluster size must also increase  For example  a 512-MB FAT partition has a cluster size of 8K  while a 2-GB partition has a cluster size of 32K       This may not sound like a big deal until you consider that the FAT file system only works in single cluster increments  For example  on a 2-GB partition  a 1-byte file will occupy the entire cluster  thereby consuming 32K  or roughly 32 000 times the amount of space that the file should consume  This rule applies to every file on your hard disk  so you can see how much space can be wasted       Converting a partition to FAT32 reduces the cluster size  and overcomes the 2-GB partition size limit   For partitions 8 GB and smaller  the cluster size is reduced to a mere 4K  As you can imagine  it s not uncommon to gain back hundreds of megabytes by converting a partition to FAT32  especially if the partition contains a lot of small files        Note  This section of the quote  article  1999  is out of date  Updated info quote below            As I mentioned  FAT32 does have limitations  Unfortunately  it isn t compatible with any operating system other than Windows 98 and the OSR2 version of Windows 95  However  Windows 2000 will be able to read FAT32 partitions         The other disadvantage is that your disk utilities and antivirus software must be FAT32-aware  Otherwise  they could interpret the new file structure as an error and try to correct it  thus destroying data in the process         Finally  I should mention that converting to FAT32 is a one-way process  Once you ve converted to FAT32  you can t convert the partition back to FAT16  Therefore  before converting to FAT32  you need to consider whether the computer will ever be used in a dual-boot environment  I should also point out that although other operating systems such as Windows NT can t directly read a FAT32 partition  they can read it across the network  Therefore  it s no problem to share information stored on a FAT32 partition with other computers on a network that run older operating systems      Updated mentioned in comment by Doktor-J  assimilated to update out of date answer in case comment is ever lost      I d just like to point out that most modern operating systems  WinXP Vista 7 8  MacOS X  most if not all Linux variants  can read FAT32  contrary to what the second-to-last paragraph suggests    The original article was written in 1999  and being posted on a Microsoft website  probably wasn t concerned with non-Microsoft operating systems anyways     The operating systems  excluded  by that paragraph are probably the original Windows 95  Windows NT 4 0  Windows 3 1  DOS  etc

[filesystems] What is the difference between VFAT and FAT32 file systems?

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