My colleague wrote about this previously in regards to external drives, but he was discussing high-capacity hard drives you plug into your PC. In dealing with this it occurred to me that Majid probably isn’t alone, and people might not be aware of the fact that you can format a USB key in Windows using one of three available file systems, and that each system has both advantages and limitations. He sent me a screenshot that clearly indicated the problem, as it read “The file is too large for the destination file system.” I replicated the issue quite easily by trying to move a 10GB file to a Fat32 disk, as Fat32 can’t handle any file larger than 4GB.įAT32 has a 4GB file size limitation, making it tough to copy HD or 4K video footage. Most vendors chose the former.Majid was unable to copy a movie from his PC to his newly acquired 32GB USB key, and wondered why. Vendors faced a quandary: Format drives in the nearly universal FAT32/exFAT and let Windows users live with reduced performance when copying large numbers of small files or format them in NTFS for better performance under Windows-but in effect, render them write-protected on Macs and unreadable on other devices. Difficult as in terminal, command line, SUDO… It’s not for the average user. Apple eventually added NTFS write support as well, but here’s the thing: It was hidden, disabled it by default and difficult to turn on.
It took longer, but eventually the Linux community felt comfortable enough with its NTFS write-code that it was added to the operating system kernel. Samsung’s T1 and T3 external SSDs are very fast writers, but not nearly as fast with small files if you format them in exFAT rather than NTFS. If your code screws up writing to a drive, you may have ruined someone’s digital life.
Reading from NTFS within other operating systems soon became possible, but reading is non-destructive, so if you mess up with the code, you still have the original file. Regardless of the why, denying access to that code was like waving a red flag in the face of open-source programmers worldwide.
It’s almost like they were in some sort of competition with other companies. Microsoft wasn’t feeling particularly generous when it came up with its second-generation file system, so the company didn’t tell anyone else how to implement it.
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