While there are documented Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP, I keep on stumbling on another one: maximal number of files per directory. Video archives are large and by design are kept in single directory. While NTFS is recommended, FAT32 is still used on a number of systems, more often on small scale ones, and the bad news is that FAT32 is often met on network-attached storage (NAS) devices, which are often of large capacity.
So, once we have 21844 (0×5554) files in the directory (it may appear though that the limit is dependent on FAT cluster size), an attempt to create new file will cause a lock inside API call boosting thread’s CPU consumption to 100%. An annoying issue to keep in mind.
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