FAT / File Allocation Table for Not Yet Techies

"Computer Careers: Using This Map of the Clusters on Your Hard Drive"

by Richard Stooker, President Info Ring Press and author of Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career

FAT / File Allocation Table is the system that an operating system maintains on a hard disk providing a map of the clusters that a file has been stored in. Clusters are the basic unit of logical storage. The clusters used by a file are not necessarily together - they can be scattered all over the hard drive. Typical cluster sizes are 2,048 bytes, 4,096 bytes and 8,192 bytes. The operating system creates a FAT / File Allocation Table for each new file.

FAT / File Allocation Table was 16 bits in length in Windows and DOS until the release of Windows 95, which introduced 32-bit support. This means that the largest possible hard drive is two terabytes. Even with today's improvements with hard drives, we're not up that high - that would store a lot of MP3 files. That's known as FAT-32.

The FAT / File Allocation Table system was introduced by Microsoft with DOS 2.1

It's a basic database that keeps track of where files are stored.

Each hard drive partition has two stored near the beginning, which are copies of each other, so if one is damaged the record can be restored from the other.

No hard drive is perfect -- all have manufacturing errors which make certain sectors unreadable. The FAT / File Allocation Table marks them with the special unusable status code.

Next: FTP

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