What Is the Maximum Drive Size for HPFS (and FAT)?
FAT has a maximum drive size of 2 GBytes. The maximum for HPFS is currently 64 GBytes, although the current 16-bit version of CHKDSK is not able to deal with drives larger than 16 GB. However, you should note that the FAT filesystem allocates storage space in units called clusters, which are groups of adjacent sectors. The larger the drive, the larger the cluster, so that for a drive in the range of 1 – 2 GB, a cluster can typically consist of 64 sectors or 32 KB (worst case, PC DOS 4.0: 128 sectors or 64 KB). Since each file typically ends a little shy of half-way through its last cluster, this means that there is a little over half a cluster (typically 16 KB) of slack space associated with each file. For this reason, large drives which will carry lots of files are usually partitioned into multiple logical drives when used with the FAT file system, leading to complications in storage management. HPFS, by contrast, always allocates sectors, with approximately half a sector of slack spa
