Microsoft Begins Licensing its exFAT File System

It’s been a while since I’ve last heard much about Microsoft’s “exFAT” file system, but it looks like we may be hearing about it more in the near-future. exFAT is of course the next version of Microsoft’s ultra-popular File Allocation Table file system, which used to be commonly used as the file system of choice in our desktops, and is now the most popular one found on things like thumb drives and memory cards (and sometimes netbooks, I’ve noticed).

The biggest perk that exFAT offers has to do with its allowances, and overall density. Even FAT 32 was rather limited in how large a file could be (~4GB) and how many files could be located in a single directory (65,536), as well as an overall volume size. exFAT blows those limitations away, and it would be hard to understand that what it offers would ever become a problem (though I know better than to state that as fact). The new volume and file size can be up to 64 Zebibytes (~64,000,000,000,000 GB), while the max number of files to a directory has been boosted to 2,796,202.

According to a post a CNET’s Beyond Binary, Microsoft has begun pressing companies to license exFAT, and based on the price alone, I’m not quite sure how quickly it’s going to pick up. For companies that want to license exFAT for things like cameras, camcorders or digital photo frames, Microsoft will charge a flat fee of $300,000. For cell phones and the like, volume licensing would kick in (the result would be far more than $300,000). Whether these are on per-model or a per-lineup basis, I’m not sure.

With these prices, I can’t see exFAT kicking off too fast, because for one, most of the devices that use FAT 32 today aren’t hitting their limits, and while exFAT might be a faster file system (I have no idea, just assuming), until USB 3.0 devices catch on (that includes cameras, thumb drives, et cetera), no one is going to feel the need for the new format. The progression of technology is sometimes hard to predict though, so maybe I’m wrong. We’ll have to wait and see.

The newer format, exFAT, can work on far larger-capacity devices than its predecessor–256 terabytes, as opposed to 32GB for FAT. It also allows for faster file saves on Secure Digital Extended Capacity cards and is more extensible than its predecessor, Microsoft said. “There has been an explosion in the use of rich audio and video files,” David Kaefer, general manager of Intellectual Property Licensing at Microsoft, said in a statement. “ExFAT is an ideal file system that delivers fast and reliable use of audio and video files.”