> It's a real pity everyone can't agree on a standard to replace FAT32. :(
Every OS in the universe supports UDF now, and its the only real ubiquitous non-proprietary filesystem. I use it on all external storage that I cannot guarantee will be touching Linux machines exclusively.
FAT32 is a terribly outdated filesystem and should just not be used today, period. The filesize and name restrictions are awful. Mrkrabo does have a point.
> They would also have to drop support for FAT32 as you pointed out.
This is a little dubious. When you load a FAT driver on a *nix system, you get the limitations of FAT. Likewise there are lots of fancy filesystem APIs in Windows that fail on a FAT volume and work on NTFS.
That said, there are a lot of quirky NTFS behaviors that are ultimately rooted in FAT. I used to get frustrated by a lot of them, then I started writing a FAT driver just for fun ... and it made sense. All the goofy things about naming start to make sense if the direntry "is your inode" and the extra space in the name is padded with spaces...
> Is it really necessary to keep dragging FAT along?
Anything involving embedded and without deep pockets has no other option, FAT (sadly) still is the least common denominator. Some speak ExFAT, but not sure how good the tooling support is outside of Microsoft, and there are still patent concerns.
delusional feedback OSNEWS like you guys had me worried FAT32 required a license. At the time I checked the microsoft site, $.25 to format a flash stick with FAT32... just factory formats! I removed support for FAT32 and made my own filesystem with the only design goal of unsuable. I got rid of FAT tables and made only whole-file saves allowed. Works great for compression. You must allocate ahead of time and do block writes if you really want to do that.
God says, "that's_for_me_to_know look_buddy high_five if_anything_can_go_wrong
population praise I_veto_that can_you_hear_me_now what_do_you_expect
what_luck here_now after_a_break no_you_cant how_goes_it
skills smart "
>TIL: In 2019, Microsoft released the exFAT [1] specs [...] I.e. exFAT should now be preferred over FAT/NTFS for media used across different operating systems.
You seem to be very optimistic about how fast these get implemented into embedded devices.
No, but FAT32 does. Exfat, on the other hand has a file size limit of 16 exibibytes. That, combined with exfat's cross-platform mounting (NTFS has a lot of limitations in this regard) makes it a superior formatting system for flash based offline file transfer.
When do you predict Windows will no longer read FAT32? My first real computer was Windows 95b and that formatted FAT32 disks, and even my current 7 installation reads and writes FAT32 on flash drives
It's nearing twenty years since I stopped using fat32. I rather doubt that's a good assumption in the modern era.
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