Ed said:
Michael,
I missed part of this thread.
Just one question: Is exFAT as crash damage resistant as ntfs?
NTFS journals metadata changes, making it somewhat crash resistant (but
anyone who has ever run chkdsk on a an NTFS partition knows this
resistance is limited). exFAT should be a bit safer than FAT, but is
not journalled.
exFAT is in no way a replacement for NTFS. It is aimed to be a bit of
an improvement over FAT (higher limits and a free space bitmap to
improve allocation), while still being light enough (in terms of
processing power, and disk space overhead) for things like cameras.
If I were a cynic, I'd say the main reason for its existence is to try
to lock people into Vista / Windows 7 or force them to upgrade older
Windows systems. MS don't like that people use FAT on usb drives and
other memory devices without paying them - few manufacturers pay the
licenses even though they are low cost, and their patents are tenuous at
best and will soon expire. Worst of all, non-MS systems can work
happily with FAT. exFAT gives MS a new chance - it is poorly specified
and documented so that these evil open-source commies can't implement
it, and the license agreements are secret so that they can give cheap
deals to boost exFAT's market penetration, then charge more once
manufacturers and users are locked in. There are certainly some patents
involved, and you can be sure that more will magically appear if anyone
else implements exFAT.
