vFAT maximum data allowed 4gb?

Question

how much data can be store on a FAT virtual drive? I know that a file can be max. 4gb on a vFAT but does that mean I can only store 4gb max on that drive?

Answer 1

Does that mean I can only store 4gb max on that drive?

The maximum volume sizd is based on if your using FAT12, FAT16, or FAT32. I am going to assume your using FAT32 based on the fact you are talking about 4 GiB files.

Additionally, VFAT is an extension of the File Allocation Table (FAT) file system architecture standard, it is NOT a file system itself.

how much data can be store on a FAT virtual drive?

This entire depends if the file system if FAT16 or FAT32. FAT16 is going to limit you to 4 GiB volume size while FAT32 will limit you to 2 TiB volume size. It is worth pointing out that the currently supported versions of Windows only support FAT32 and exFAT.

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.

Source: Choosing Between File Systems

Additionally

Further, the term "VFAT" has led to various misconceptions as well, as it is sometimes erroneously used as if it would describe another variant of FAT file system to be distinguished from the FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 file systems, while in reality it does not specify another file system, but an optional extension, which can work on top of any FAT file system, FAT12, FAT16 or FAT32. Volumes utilizing VFAT long-filenames can be read also by operating systems not supporting the VFAT extension, for as long as they support the underlying file system.

Source: File Allocation Table