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
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.
I managed to format my USB so that it’s recognised by all three major OS. Can’t remember the FS name …
Uh, fat32? 😅
I didn’t know this is an issue. I use ext2 on my flash drives, and everything is fine.
They should format it as f2fs
