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FAT16 was designed for Hard Drives that were larger than 16MB. It uses a 16-Bit Cluster addressing system that allows for Hard Drives sizes up to 4GB.

It was used by later MS-DOS versions (Earlier ones using FAT12), as well as Early Windows Versions.

FAT16 has a maximum File Size of 4GB, and a Maximum Volume Size of 4GB (On MS-DOS, and Windows 9x, they only support up to 32KB Clusters, making the maximum Volume Size they can support 2GB). Maximum Number of files on a FAT16 Volume is 65536, with the maximum viewable number of files and folders in the Root is 512.

Also see the FAT16 Structure Information


FAT16 has been superceded by FAT32 and NTFS.


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