File Systems—FAT 12/16
Albert J. Marcella, Frederic Guillossou · 2012
This chapter covers file systems and concepts related to the “mounting” of data into identifiable information. Using the FAT filing system as a backdrop helps explain many important concepts such as allocated space, slack space, endianness, and bit reordering. These concepts are essential in understanding how data is overwritten in the normal saving, deleting, and general processing of information. Understanding that a file system exists and having an idea of how file systems operate in general is critical to understanding how data is accessed, stored, changed, deleted, and/or overwritten. File systems determine how and where files are placed on a hard drive, with the goal of trying to optimize data retrieval speeds. Saving files to contiguous clusters is optimally more efficient for data access and retrieval.