Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

exFAT [0] is a great option. It's FAT32 updated with all the modern requirements. Surprised there was no mention of it! It's by Microsoft and is supported on XP and above (out of the box on Vista, update available for XP and Server 2003). It's surprisingly fast, robust, and all around a great OS to use for storing shared data.

There's a free implementation available for Linux [1] (actually in the default apt/yum/whatever repos for many distros) and it ships out-of-the-box on recent OS X installs [2].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT 1: https://code.google.com/p/exfat/ 2: http://www.macrumors.com/2010/11/11/mac-os-x-10-6-5-notes-ex...

EDIT

Yes, it is mentioned in the article. The article sucks. It does not define what "modern" features are of a filesystem, and the author clearly sets off with his end goal in mind ("there is no cross-platform FS") randomly removing FSes from the consideration for vague and hand-wavy reasons. This applies to several of the entries in his list. I mean the guy thinks UDF will do the trick, but exFAT is not good enough? Come on!

I think a lot of people would contend exFAT is NOT a great option by virtue of the fact that Microsoft holds patents on the filesystem and has (in the past) enforced those patents. So it's pretty unlikely that it's ever going to have great support on Linux.

Yeah, I'm sure Linus, Theo, et al. will be totally willing to pay those patent license fees. Really quite small in the overall scheme of things when you get such a great file system in return -- yeah, NOT.

I wouldn't trust any data I particularly cared about to exFAT. Its a non journaled file system with only a single FAT and free space bitmap in most implementations. i.e. its fairly easy to corrupt and very difficult to recover.

[Anecdote] Seagate and ExFAT; I will avoid these two till the day I die.

I've had at least 3 (I'm not sure, maybe more) Seagate internal HDDs failed on me in the past several years (I don't do anything remotely crazy with my MacBook Pro or other machines). And I've had a 1TB external HDD and 3 USB disks ruined by ExFAT (yes, I always 'eject' the volume before yanking in out from USB port).

I don't know what the hell is wrong with either of them - Maybe I've been unlucky. But that's the truth, and I'm sure the problem wasn't from my side.

Actually, exFAT is mentioned in the article.

I've been in a similar situation as the OP. I was trying to share an external USB drive with Linux, OS X and Windows 8 with my git-annex archive on it. Turns out exFAT doesn't support soft links (git-annex needs them to work), which is a feature I think should be supported by any modern filesystem. In general, you're shit out of luck with git-annex os interoperability :/.

The first thing that comes in my mind is that we shouldn't expect something new and valuable in a near future becuase I believe that technology tends to be more focuced on the cloud filesystems rather than developing new portable filesystems where OS doesn't matter and everything is accessible. The common cloud filesystem might be the best option for such problems.

I do agree that exFAT is probably one of the better solutions out of what's available.

The author mentions journaling and extents (particularly important for his torrenting use-case to prevent fragmentation), which I feel are the way he defines "modern". exFAT also supports neither transparent encryption nor transparent compression.

Unfortunately for being a closed filesystem, I can't trust the linux implementation until its quite mature. It also won't be available in the kernel, which really hurts performance (important in an age with fast devices like USB3). As such this is not an option for linux users.

FUSE only? Proprietary with no spec released? I wanted to like it, but it's also easy not to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com