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Comment by avidphantasm | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully exFAT implementations will get more robust. At least with the macOS implementation, it has always been prone to reporting corruption when devices are not ejected properly. I can usually fix it by running check disk or whatever on Windows, but sometimes not.

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One change from previous FAT filesystems to exFAT is the removal of the second, redundant file allocation table. Disks are less unreliable now so it is less necessary, but there are still some scenarios, especially when the filesystem is in a dirty state, where the table can be corrupted.

This can also really hurt in unexpected ways with otherwise badly written drivers. Nintendo's driver for the switch would constantly write to the table unnecessarily, and while this doesn't do all that much in normal operation (other than waste a small number of writes), it made it drastically more likely (in some cases for some games almost guaranteed) that the table would be partially written and corrupt if the system crashed or lost power unexpectedly. When some new Pokemon games came out and were initially a bit unstable this came up a lot.

I've had more filesystem corruption trouble with exFAT on Linux than with any other filesystem, ever, including Btrfs. Really crossing my fingers and hoping for the quality of the Samsung driver in Linux 5.7. It's going to be great to have an option for high-capacity, cross-platform read/write storage. The day I never have to use NTFS-3G again cannot come too soon.

> The day I never have to use NTFS-3G again cannot come too soon.

That day might be soon

https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/12/31/126

I know everyone talks about 2020 having felt like a long year, but I had totally forgotten that Paragon had started trying to submit that back in August[0]. I'm really glad to see this is progressing. What a monumental set of changes. This won't change the NTFS situation on macOS, of course but even in a post-exFAT world, NTFS will remain a relevant concern for Linux/Windows dual-booting, and I'd love to see this get merged.

[0]: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/2911ac5cd20b46e397be50...

Were you using the FUSE driver?

That's a great question. I kind of skirted around indicating one way or the other in my parent post because I've forgotten. My troubles were as recent as the beginning of 2020, but I encountered them on a Raspbian machine, so Lord knows what kernel version it was running at the time. Probably pre-5.4, in which case, yes, it would've been the FUSE driver.

Thanks it was probably the FUSE driver. I haven't had a problem with it but I'm not a heavy user.

On the other hand I've been a heavy user of exFat formatted sd cards on Samsung phones for long years and had no problems with it, so hopefully the new Linux driver (which Samsung upstreamed) will be solid.

So, since we're on kernel 5.10, has this new Samsung exFAT driver been tested? Is it at least as reliable as btrfs?

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