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Rev

Thank you, this makes a lot of sense! Regarding size limits, from what I understand FAT16 at that time was already able to support disks well beyond what was available at that time, is this wrong? Maybe I missed something!
– Evert
Commented Feb 25 at 4:20
4

Fat16 max capacity was increased by increasing block size, which makes storage of small files extremely inefficient... so there was benefit to making smaller partitions that didn't need the larger block size. This was fixed with vfat, and fixed again with xfat.
– user10489
Commented Feb 25 at 4:23
As for separating the OS and user data; I used to run MS-DOS 5 and I feel this was less of a concern because the OS didn't take over the whole disk, so it was relatively easy to install a completely new OS because all you need is SYS and write new utilities to C:\DOS. Needing to wipe your entire disk to install a OS feels like something that became more of a concern later, but also could be wrong here...
– Evert
Commented Feb 25 at 4:23
1

ok, the block size issue makes sense. I guess the block size dictates the minimum size any file will take up?
– Evert
Commented Feb 25 at 4:25
1

Filesystems typically have a max addressible number of blocks, which is why block size was increased, bypassing that limit. Yes, minimum file size is a multiple of the block size.
– user10489
Commented Feb 25 at 4:26

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