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.
Compatibility.
exFAT is fully compatible with all modern OSs and any device running a somewhat modern Linux kernel
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.
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
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….
If you’re cold they’re cold. Plug them in and warm them up.
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
The chance of being hacked with a randomly found USB drive is near zero
It increases if you find them near secure locations.
That’s fair I guess. But for the average person, not so much
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
There are so many open filesystems that I’m not sure that it’s really a valid issue. It’s more that MS values compatibility with prehistoric stuff more than anything. If it was up to them, we’d still be using wax tablets and styluses for compatibility’s sake.
I wish Windows would support f2fs. I’m tired of formatting drives as fat32 to give files to my sister. Windows somehow manages to corrupt it from unzipping a folder.
They did manage to move beyond BMP images, so anything is possible.
I still have to use MBR instead of GPT because there are people still running Windows versions that can’t read it.
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.
I managed to format my USB so that it’s recognised by all three major OS. Can’t remember the FS name …
ExFAT?
Nope, not that one. “Universal Flash Storage”, now that I remember
Uh, fat32? 😅
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
I didn’t know this is an issue. I use ext2 on my flash drives, and everything is fine.
com’on
They should format it as f2fs
