Hopefully exFAT implementations will get more robust. At least with the macOS implementation, it has always been prone to reporting corruption when devices are not ejected properly. I can usually fix it by running check disk or whatever on Windows, but sometimes not.
The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
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Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#42Many embedded devices can read FAT32 and that's it. If you need to use a drive larger than 32GB for these, there are tools that will let you format them as FAT32 from within Windows.
One example: FAT32Format GUI - https://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/FAT32fo...
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#43I hit this a couple of days ago when helping a friend set up their new DJ decks. The decks only supported FAT32 but would happily read a 128gb USB stick.
The article states that you can format as fat32 from the command line - this wasn't my experience. Disk Util (cli) saw my raw partition and started formatting it as FAT32, but seemed to fail about an hour in saying the disk was too big.
I ended up finding a random abandoned GUI utility which seemed to work, though it's extremely infuriating.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#44TIL: In 2019, Microsoft released the exFAT [1] specs to a large group of vendors [2], including prominent Linux vendors. I.e. exFAT should now be preferred over FAT/NTFS for media used across different operating systems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Invention_Network
Huh, I thought exFAT was much older, not 2019.
It is – it dates back to 2006. But before 2019, the spec was proprietary and patent-encumbered. And the Linux kernel didn't include a good driver for it until 5.7, released in May of last year[0].
[0]: https://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_5.7#New_exFAT_file_system
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#45TIL: In 2019, Microsoft released the exFAT [1] specs to a large group of vendors [2], including prominent Linux vendors. I.e. exFAT should now be preferred over FAT/NTFS for media used across different operating systems. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Invention_Network
The patents on FAT32 are now fully expired, including the final lingering LongFileName one.
Therefore FAT32 will remain preferred until the patents expire on exFAT, even though the specification for exFAT has been released, things like that have proven to be not good enough until after the patents expire.
The purpose of exFAT appears mainly to be an attempt to foist a new encumbered filesystem on developers now that the first mainstream Microsoft filesystem is in the public domain.
We will know when Microsoft has reduced their anti-user stance on filesystems after they have released very detailed full NTFS specifications in the most useful way possible.
Also I have the greatest respect for Dave, and like he mentioned he was only doing the UI not the bitmoving of the actual Format process.
Those who were developing the NT version of FAT32 formatting failed in much more serious ways where Dave did not.
The inconsistency compared to FAT32 formatted by W9x is actually intolerable.
Best reliability still requires booting to the DOS from W98SE to properly format FAT32.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#46Hopefully exFAT implementations will get more robust. At least with the macOS implementation, it has always been prone to reporting corruption when devices are not ejected properly. I can usually fix it by running check disk or whatever on Windows, but sometimes not.
I've had more filesystem corruption trouble with exFAT on Linux than with any other filesystem, ever, including Btrfs. Really crossing my fingers and hoping for the quality of the Samsung driver in Linux 5.7. It's going to be great to have an option for high-capacity, cross-platform read/write storage. The day I never have to use NTFS-3G again cannot come too soon.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a single file that is 6 million megabytes in size.
who/what reads that file?
Not my file, but I have produced HDF5 files in that size range using simulation codes on supercomputers and paraview can open them and render 3d view as video from it (eventually).
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#48It also conveniently allowed Microsoft to collect license fees from ExFAT patents on all SDXC devices.
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#49Actually NT4.0 did not support FAT32 at all (unless you installed a little-known driver from Sysinternals I've never actually seen used in the wild).
So maybe his work was on Windows 2000?
Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, this only applies to systems that actually have this (i.e. they were updated after exFAT released or released after and included this update). There will be sadly many systems that will never receive this update. But for a fun fact, if you see many embedded systems that say they can only support an SD card up to 32 GB, it is a soft limitation due to the fact that media over 32 GB are pre-formatted to e…
> But for a fun fact, if you see many embedded systems that say they can only support an SD card up to 32 GB, it is a soft limitation due to the fact that media over 32 GB are pre-formatted to exFAT (and the system lacks support for exFAT). There might also be the issue of the card reading hardware only supprting SDHC instead of SDXC (or SDUC).
Even then it is actually only a driver or firmware limitation most of the time.
My old laptop has Ricoh SDHC card reader. Windows can't read 64GB SD cards (properly formatted with exFAT according to the standard) on it because it's using the proprietary Ricoh driver.
On Linux it works just fine because it's using the generic SD card reader driver which supports SDXC.