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0 pointsasveikau2y ago0 comments

It's not as universally supported and it's patent encumbered.

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5 comments · 2 top-level

chungy2y ago· 3 in thread

If you have some random set-top box or camera that doesn't support exFAT, fair enough, but the situations are becoming few and far between. Windows, Mac, Linux all have native support for it.

No (practical) volume size or file size limits is a huge win for exFAT over FAT32.

asveikauOP2y ago

I gave you a succinct explanation of why exfat won't work everywhere, and you are basically denying that it's relevant. This attitude is reminding me what being a Microsoft employee was like.

chungy2y ago

I am denying that it is as serious as you say. exFAT has been around for nearly two decades, and nearly everything from the past 15 years supports it.

If you choose to format an SD card as FAT32 because your 20 year old device doesn't support exFAT, that is entirely reasonable. Maybe a 20 year old device doesn't have much use for >4GiB files either. On the other hand, if your device does support exFAT, there isn't any reason to avoid it. The lack of file size limit should be a particular advantage (with 1080p and especially 2160p video, >4GiB files are common).

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vetinari2y ago

Be careful with exfat and macos, the macos driver is known to be able to damage the fs.

black3r2y ago

the support got much better since exFAT became part of the SDXC specifications (anything that supports SD cards bigger than 32GB has to support exFAT). At minimum it has read/write support built into Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS, so an exFAT formatted external drive is supported by 99% devices I need to plug one into.

The only device I can think of that doesn't support exFAT drives and I used it at least once with an external drive is my Asus router (and it runs kernel 5.4 so it could support it, but I guess it was omitted to keep the kernel small).

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