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this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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Wait, people use thumb drives with whatever formatting was on it when they ripped open the box? Next you’re gonna tell me people pick up random usb sticks off the ground and plug it in to their computer….
That is the best way to hack a company
Bonus points if you make the .pdf have to be moved off the thumb drive to open
If you're cold they're cold. Plug them in and warm them up.
It may have a lot to do with licensing royalties. Exfat was created by Microsoft and is licensed for use. So why increase the cost of the device when you can just ship it with the older system that costs nothing.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/legal/intellectualproperty/tech-licensing/programs#exfat
Literally everything with USB can read FAT32, there's some old or incredibly simple stuff out there that doesn't read exFAT.
Manufacturers ideally want to spend as little as possible handling support for users, so they go with the option that isn't going to result in returns from people who think it doesn't work with their old printer or whatever.
Updated some recent Gigabyte mini-pc using EFI shell the other month. I had to have a USB flash drive with FAT32
I have a client that does HVAC work who needed help preparing a 128GB flash drive for loading firmware onto high end thermostats. Quickly ran the command to format as FAT32 because that's what the thermostats require (and he indicated the firmware files would exceed the 32GB limit in the GUI)
Are you formatting it using the windows disk manager? Any 3rd party tool will allow you to go above the 32GB limit.
I've had smart TVs that only updates with fat32 formatted USBs for firmware, for a concrete example.
Plus exfat has a LOT of caveats. Like no linking....
Could make it f2fs, but I'd bet Windows doesn't support that.
You can format a flash drive with whatever the hell file system you want. Just, don't expect anything formatted exFAT to work in any dedicated device made before 2019, nor even the majority of them made afterwards.
The ones who need to get their shit together are the manufacturers of printers, media players, car head units, set top boxes, game consoles, and all the other things into which you might want to insert a flash drive (or memory card) that is not a full-blown PC.
What's wrong with exfat? I've used it dozens of time with no problems.
Edit: oh thought you meant wth pcs. You mean cars and receivers and stuff. Fair.
It's not like formatting it to another filesystem is remotely difficult. Hell you could even make multiple partitions and a software raid, LVM, whatever.
If you need a different filesystem, then do that.
Compatibility.
exFAT is fully compatible with all modern OSs and any device running a somewhat modern Linux kernel
The keyword here is "modern". Some people use older hardware, like DVRs with ancient firmwares.
Most people, nowadays, use cloud services instead of USB sticks, so I guess it's preferred to focus on supporting legacy devices.
The real problem may be external hard drives. Those are commonly used by media creators. Unless they know that they should format to exFAT when buying, they will learn it when it's way too late.
I may be on the later category. It was ~15 years ago, and little Jimmy (me) got his first external hard drive. However, he didn't know about formats, and that he couldn't copy 4.5GB movies to his new toy.
Back then, it was either 4GB file size limit (FAT32), or it only works on one platform (NTFS, ext2, whatever Apple was using, ...)
I think they mean compatibility with old devices like 5-10 year old handheld devices that don't get updates.
There was a period where very early digital cameras (think 1.2 megapixels) could only read up to 4 gigabyte memory cards, so camera stores had a stock of smaller cards for when people came in with 'old faithful' and couldn't get the 8, 16 and 32 gig cards working with it.
I'm not sure companies want to risk a corrupted card killing all of. 2 hour recording where the practice of splitting into 4gig chunks for later reconstruction might mean only the latest 15-29 minutes of a recording is lost if corrupted.
Why can't they just make one universal standard format and then just stick to that in all systems rather than have 400 million random different incompatible file systems running around? Wouldn't 400 million and 1 be better?
Recently tried to make a printer scan a file to an exFAT formatted thumb drive, didn't go well. Then tried moving a file from a windows to a linux machine using another exFAT formatted thumb drive, still no luck lol.
I get the impression that ext4 is more widely supported than exFAT.
Lol nah, exFAT is the only current FS (other than fat32) capable of being read AND written to by Linux, MacOS and Windows out of the box
It certainly should be. And as we're on it, Mainboards should support it too. It's a pain to create special partitions, and sometimes even use MBR instead of GPT, just for a BIOS update.
I pushed a friend to format an external hard drive with exFAT and not Apple's filesystem for compability, but something with the M2 MacBook eventually messed up the filesystem and it couldn't read it. Troubleshooting and reading forums, found there's something with the new Macs and exFAT. Ended up having to use an x86 apple device to recover the data.
With it being formatted as fat32 by default it means you can format it to whatever you want however you want when you get it.
...but....that's true of all FS's lol
Is it the case with window xp etc. because it's legacy systems (no matter how long ago their EOL was) that makes them do this sort of stuff
Ironic that it's called "fat32"
Why? FAT=File Allocation Table, 32 refers to 32-bit, for which the maximum is 4,294,967,295, hence the 4GB limit.
32 bit width for values
what's ironic about it?