What are different types FAT in computer?

Answer 1

There are two types of File Allocation Table (FAT) file systems currently used on computer disks (FAT16 & FAT32) but the there have been others:

1. FAT8, the original FAT file system
2. FAT12, designed for use on 5.25 inch floppy disks, became inefficient on hard disks larger than about 32Mbyte
3. FAT16, designed to support hard disks into the low gigabyte range
4. FAT32, designed to support hard disks into the low terabyte range

The FAT file systems unfortunately become rapidly inefficient as disk capacity increases because it must use larger cluster sizes on larger disks (wasting more bytes in small files). A workaround for this has been to partition disks that were too large into more efficient sizes. When newer higher capacity hard disks began to make this workaround impractical, the FAT entry size was increased (from 12 bits to 16 bits then to 32 bits) so more clusters could be mapped in the table and cluster size could then be kept down to a more efficient size. There are also some extensions to these basic FAT types (e.g. FAT16B, FAT16+, FAT16X, FAT32+, FAT32X, VFAT, UVFAT, FATX, exFAT), but as standard device driver and utility software often does not support them many problems and incompatibility issues (including data loss) can result.

But FAT is not the only file system type available, there are many that were designed from the beginning for use on large capacity hard disks and thus do not have the limitations of FAT. A few of these are:

• NTFS
• HFS+ (Journaled)
• ext
• ext2
• ext3
• ext4
• FILES-11
• NSS
• OneFS
• UFS
• UFS2
• XFS
• Xsan
• EFS
• etc.