Thanks.
I did a bit of reading and I wanted to double check you meant bigger than 1Tb or smaller than 1Tb? I read in some places there are limitations if the size is 2tb or more, but nothing in relation to drives that are smaller than 1tb. Also if you meant bigger than 1tb - will any drive sold as 1tb be ok? (since droves often say 1tb and very often are slightly less - and I don’t know if that is an issue) And I don’t want to have to invest in the next SSD up which is 2tb and more than double the price.
Many thanks
Sorry, that was a typo - should have been 2 TB. When formatting a drive larger than 2TB with FAT32 you must break in into partitions smaller than 2TB due to the size limit of the format.
For the FAT32 typical value of 512 bytes per sector:
FAT32 maximum : 8 sectors per cluster × 268,435,444 clusters = 1,099,511,578,624 bytes (≈1,024 GB)
FAT32 maximum : 16 sectors per cluster × 268,173,557 clusters = 2,196,877,778,944 bytes (≈2,046 GB)
[FAT32 maximum : 32 sectors per cluster × 134,152,181 clusters = 2,197,949,333,504 bytes (≈2,047 GB)]
[FAT32 maximum : 64 sectors per cluster × 67,092,469 clusters = 2,198,486,024,192 bytes (≈2,047 GB)]
[FAT32 maximum : 128 sectors per cluster × 33,550,325 clusters = 2,198,754,099,200 bytes (≈2,047 GB)]
See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_the_FAT_file_system. for everything you ever wanted to know about the FAT filesystem.
You can see from the copied table that the maximum partition size is 2,047GB or ~2TB. You can have a 5TB drive and partition it off into a minimum of 3 partitions and use FAT32 on each partition as long as the largest partition is less than 2TB.
Does this answer the questions you have?