I was recently watching CompTia A+ Core 2019, Managing Disks in Windows Part 2, and the filing system ExFAT was discussed. They made mention to how the max partition size is 128 Petabytes but the max file size is 16 Exabytes. My question is how can the max file size be larger than the possible volume on a partition?
-
ExFAT
-
That is a great question, let me see if this helps:
The file system recognizes 64 bit computing so in "theory" that file size would be 2^64= 16EB approx. Well that is a great "theoretical" limit but the volume size is maxed at 128 PB. So while the file system is 2^64 max size, it will be limited to that max volume size.
Another way to think of it is imagine a container and a water source. Your container is the size of a coffee/tea cup, however your water source has the ability to dispense 50 coffee/tea cups of water, you can fill the container to its max limit, however the water source "theoretically" could keep pouring water but the container would not hold the total amount that the water source can supply. So the container is the volume size and the water source is the file size. I hope this helps.
