Why are we still using FAT?

[TreVader]

It's been how many years with the same format, why no change? I can't think of many other standards that have gone unchanged as long as this. FAT32 still is the stock format for most android and OSX devices. It still causes issues transferring files >4GB.

 

[jumpncrash]

I'd say for compatibility

 

[Cerb]

Lack of patent reform, and compatibility.

Windows makes it hard to arbitrarily add filesystems, so a 3rd party one, like F2FS, which is maturing at an OK pace, would be a nightmare for end users (even assuming all 777 if mounted under Windows). Everybody has already been using FAT for years, so...

There aught to be no IP issues with a clean-room implementation of NTFS, for example. But is that the case, and if so, how do you prove that in a way that would prevent MS' lawyers from using standard big company strong-arming (like extending litigation to drain your small company dry)? MS wants licensing, so you'd be open to some real risk by offering a commercial product and not making a deal. But that deal then cuts into your profits.

 

[C1]

Still use FAT32 in some places mostly for compatibility, but also ext. drives using it do register slower.

As for 4Gb limits, I'd recommend staying away from huge single files anyways (eg, some programs have options to allow file parsing). My experience is that it is safer & more reliable to transfer parsed files (particularly when multi-tasking) plus if/when an interruption occurs, it is much easier to make corrective action (eg, a movie constructed of 1Gb VOBs).

In general, large files such as ISOs do have their niche, but for most people they are infrequent or not the norm.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Aren't we all using exFAT now instead of FAT32?

 

[Cerb]

Aren't we all using exFAT now instead of FAT32?

No. I have 0 devices supporting exFAT, and one real PC that does. I can't think of anything that takes add-on storage not supporting FAT32. Plus, I benchmarked exFAT v. FAT32 on my desktop, exFAT was a steaming pile (not that I expected better, with a default 128KB cluster size, but...).

 

[PliotronX]

For thumb drives it is a little more resilient to corruption by yanking drives than NTFS and of course is more compatible as well as being a tad faster because it is not writing as much.

 

[corkyg]

In order for thumb drives to be universally compatible as boot drives, they still require FAT32, That does limit files to 4GB, but for most bootable flash drive apps, that is insignificant. Example, disk cloning.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I'd say for compatibility

Primarily this. If you want a flash drive that can be read in damn near every OS then you need FAT32, a great deal of the time the 4Gb limit per file isn't a problem.

 

[Cerb]

For thumb drives it is a little more resilient to corruption by yanking drives than NTFS and of course is more compatible as well as being a tad faster because it is not writing as much.

NTFS is much more resilient than FAT32 for that. That was among the reasons for its creation (just replace, "yanking drives," with, "power outages," or, "BSODs"). FAT32 will complain less, but that's because of not being able to detect what exactly is wrong, which is not a good thing for your data.

 

[corkyg]

NTFS is a Microsoft item. May not be readable in native Apple or Linux systems.

 

[VirtualLarry]

FAT(32) is free and available. Why not?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

+1 for the flash drive faction . . . .

 

[Essence_of_War]

Before we go any further, I'm pretty sure this:

FAT32 still is the stock format for most android and OSX devices

is just not true. It may be true of android, but I'm pretty sure that any system running OSX need to have HFS+ as the root file system, and I'm pretty sure that ios devices use HFS+ as well.

Filesystems are hard.

If you make a good one, with a lot of nice features, like journaling, and you want people to actually use it, you need it to have OS support. But if you help people write OS support for it, you might be worried that they'll learn enough about your filesystem to steal you special sauce or whatever. So in practice, several of the most well-known filesystems come from OS distributors. Microsoft sells Windows, which is designed to run on an NTFS filesystem. Apple sells hardware that runs OSX, which is designed to only run on an HFS+ filesystem. In both cases, the proprietary OS and the proprietary filesystem work together to shield each other. As a result, no one distributing a proprietary OS has any particular motivation to support other modern filesystems.

There are excellent open filesystems. XFS, ext3/4, JFS, etc. Linux and BSD based OS's use them. And through user-space drivers, many linux distros are able to read and write to NTFS and HFS+ filesystems (with some caveats).

There are even more intense filesystems, like BTRFS and ZFS, which unlike NTFS and HFS+, which sort of bear the evolutionary marks of lowly origins, have been designed top-down to bring all sorts of modern tools to the party. They can roll-up all of the duties of a filesystem, a logical volume manager, and a raid controller. They allow a number of powerful tools like snapshots, transparent compression and encryption, etc.

Anyway, all of this to say:

It's been how many years with the same format, why no change? I can't think of many other standards that have gone unchanged as long as this.

There have been changes. Many changes. There are LOTS of filesystems out there, but FAT32 has remained a useful option because it's an open standard, that is easy to implement support for in an OS (largely because it doesn't do a whole lot). If you need a portable storage system like an SD card, that will have to be reliably read/written to/from on a number of different OS's systems, it can fill that void without too much work.

 

[C1]

BTW, recently I noticed that all my optical drives (desktops as well as notebooks) support Ram Disk (ie, DvDRAM).

I had a sample MAXTOR single side 4.7 (came with one of the writers bought long ago) and I recently began using it as a working temp space (miscel, junk and intermediate files) to keep from cluttering up my HDDs. (For example, I seem to generate lots of intermediate junk files when processing photographs or doing a photo/graphics project.)

It worked out great so far & so I ordered a five pack of ones still offered by VERBATIM (come in 5X single 4.7 and double sided 9.4s - both versions hard coated).

You can format them in different formats (eg, UDF for packet writing), but Windows will format them in FAT32. Using FAT, they are basically an optical HDD (ie, full random access feature; ie, not sessions).

They are just great to throw junk to, working storage and stuff that your not sure you will want to reference again.

Read/Write is real fast too.

If/when the DvDRAM gets full then you could just archive your trash to a regular DvD if you want.

 

[cytg111]

fat32 also has this annoying 2 second resolution timestamp .. be gone I say ..

 

[bononos]

Why? Because Microsoft has no native support for ext2/3/4.

 

[Eug]

Ah, I see you've started a thread on this, after that CPU thread. Funny you should mention this just now though. The last disk I formatted was in exFAT.

There are two reasons I did that:

1) I want it readable both on Windows and on Mac OS X.
2) FAT32 isn't 100% compatible with my filenames.

Before we go any further, I'm pretty sure this:
is just not true. It may be true of android, but I'm pretty sure that any system running OSX need to have HFS+ as the root file system, and I'm pretty sure that ios devices use HFS+ as well.

Interestingly, the only type of flash drive you can plug into an iOS device must be FAT/FAT32 formatted. HFS+ does not work. I know you said OS X, but I just thought this was interesting.

Same goes for stock Android. ext3/ext4 does not work.

 

[Essence_of_War]

That is interesting! I'll look into ios, but my understanding is that the root ios filesystem is HFS+. I don't actually know what the root filesystem is for stock android, it may well be fat32. That does seem like a curious limitation for external USBs in both cases, though.

 

[Eug]

I believe iOS native is HFSX and Android native is ext4. However, both support FAT32 for external flash devices (although the support in iOS is rather limited), and usually neither support their native file system on external flash devices AFAIK.

Some Android devices do support other formats on external flash though, like NTFS and exFAT, but that usually means they've licensed drivers for those formats from companies like Paragon.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.paragon.mounter&hl=en

I know Asus has done this in the past, to get NTFS/exFAT support so that people can play their 8 GB MKV files off microSD on those Asus tablets (except the Nexus line).

The ironic part is you can get HFS+ support on Android for external devices, but AFAIK you can't get that for iOS.

 

[BFG10K]

Most (if not all) BIOS/UEFI implementations only support FAT for things like flashing or saving profiles. My board can't read exFAT thumb drives when I update the UEFI.

Add that to the compatibility list.

 

[Dufus]

If the BIOS does not natively support the FS then you could try to find and load a FS driver yourself.

For instance http://efi.akeo.ie/downloads/efifs-0.6.1/x64/
64-bit EFI drivers for affs, bfs, btrfs, exfat, ext2, hfs, hfsplus, iso9660, jfs, nilfs2, ntfs, reiserfs, sfs, udf, ufs2, xfs, zfs although AFAIK these are read only FS drivers.

Also maybe have a look at ReFind.