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The mkfs or newfs tools on any Linux or *BSD don't have the limit. The Windows kernel also does fine on larger volumes formatted on a free OS.

I do this all the time for SD cards. (Because who wants exfat?)




Who doesn't want exFAT? It's all around better.


It's not as universally supported and it's patent encumbered.


If you have some random set-top box or camera that doesn't support exFAT, fair enough, but the situations are becoming few and far between. Windows, Mac, Linux all have native support for it.

No (practical) volume size or file size limits is a huge win for exFAT over FAT32.


I gave you a succinct explanation of why exfat won't work everywhere, and you are basically denying that it's relevant. This attitude is reminding me what being a Microsoft employee was like.


I am denying that it is as serious as you say. exFAT has been around for nearly two decades, and nearly everything from the past 15 years supports it.

If you choose to format an SD card as FAT32 because your 20 year old device doesn't support exFAT, that is entirely reasonable. Maybe a 20 year old device doesn't have much use for >4GiB files either. On the other hand, if your device does support exFAT, there isn't any reason to avoid it. The lack of file size limit should be a particular advantage (with 1080p and especially 2160p video, >4GiB files are common).


There are devices made more recently than 20 years ago that only do fat32. It's not sufficient to point out some standard or that the Linux kernel has a driver and that somehow covers every embedded device.


Be careful with exfat and macos, the macos driver is known to be able to damage the fs.


the support got much better since exFAT became part of the SDXC specifications (anything that supports SD cards bigger than 32GB has to support exFAT). At minimum it has read/write support built into Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS, so an exFAT formatted external drive is supported by 99% devices I need to plug one into.

The only device I can think of that doesn't support exFAT drives and I used it at least once with an external drive is my Asus router (and it runs kernel 5.4 so it could support it, but I guess it was omitted to keep the kernel small).


Anyone transferring files to modded game consoles is probably better off using FAT32


Which console supports removeable media with FAT32 (rather than FAT16) but not exFAT?

Unless you mean internal hard drives, maybe then the Xbox?


Flash carts for 30-year-old and older retro consoles often require FAT32. Think everdrive.


does fat32 support larger files than 4GB, common for video files shared with USB or SD cards?


No. A lot of software will split files for this use case.




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