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The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

theregister.com

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Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

#71

Post by dingaling »

igneo676 wrote: post #65
KronisLV wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does not matter any more if there are still valid patents for exFAT. Would you care to elaborate for why that is? Would anyone else with knowledge about the patent system and any possible risks imposed by it also like to do so?

Because, effectively, the exFAT filesystem is OSS since August 2019 and Microsoft released all the specifications to it [0]. Microsoft has essentially taken public, legal steps to ensure that anyone else can use exFAT without legal encumbrances and without threat of lawsuit. IANAL - so there's likely some caveats (you probably can't just use the exFAT name unless certain qualifications are met, just like you can't us…

> Because, effectively, the exFAT filesystem is OSS since August 2019

No its inclusion in Linux was the result of a decision by Microsoft, not a granting of an open license. Any other implementation still has to apply for a license:

"For customers wanting only a patent license, you can contact us to learn more about the exFAT licensing program and request a pricing proposal."

Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

#72

Post by jackric »

jandrese wrote: post #33
woliveirajr wrote: post #2

TL;DR: "simple lack of foresight combined with the age-old problem of the temporary solution becoming de-facto permanent"

More directly: He only expected his code to be used in Windows NT and made the fatal flaw of thinking that just because he slapped it together in an hour it would be easy for someone to rewrite in the next version of Windows to up the limit. Instead the code sat untouched for decades as the limit slowly became more and more unreasonable. IMHO the real issue is the artificial limit. Instead of straight up disallowing…

>Instead the code sat untouched for decades as the limit slowly became more and more unreasonable.

My projects likely won't span decades but when I know I'm putting in some opinionated value I leave behind a comment like:

// XXX picking 32gb because it'll probably be 5 years until we have >32gb hard drives. Change this when the world changes!

Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

#73

Post by TwoNineFive »

rlv-dan wrote: post #17

He made a decision and assumed when making future NT versions this would be revised and updated with the times. I can only image that future teams looked at this and thought "someone chose 32GB for a reason, better not change it"...

In other words, he failed to comment his code adequately.

Re: The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

#75

Post by fomine3 »

BuildTheRobots wrote: post #43

I 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 a…

I suspect the command the article said is diskpart.
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