Microsoft licenses exFAT; Coming to Mac's soon?
Here's the article:
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/new...ile-system.ars
Ok, the article doesn't say exFAT is coming to Mac's, but what Mac's have been sporting lately is a SD slot. Newer SDXC cards are coming with much larger capacities, up to 2TB and perhaps even beyond. They use exFAT, a file format designed by MS for SDXC.
The new Mac's with SD slots can access the larger capacity SDXC, BUT NOT THEIR SPEED.
According to my rough calculations the new SDXC access speed can be around twice the speed of 7,200 RPM hard drives. Making them highly desirable as bootable backups or external large storage devices replacing hard drives.
It might even be possible to use SDXC as main bootup drives.
OF course the problem is the Mac access speed, this might have to do with exFAT and Microsoft just licensed it.
Now Apple could come up with their own exFAT for SDXC, or license Microsoft's. But somehow the speed of SDXC will have to be addressed in upcoming Mac's. Or else downloading movies from your 20 megapixel camera will be very slow.
How Apple will address this issue remains to be seen, but I'm not buying a new Mac unless I know I can access the full speed of SDXC. It's the future.
Another problem is SD cards stick out the side of Mac's instead of being flush and spring released or some other method to prevent them from being forgotten and snapped off.
A flush mounted SDXC card would make a nice Time Machine or auto-clone bootable backup in case your laptop boot drive fails.
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/new...ile-system.ars
Ok, the article doesn't say exFAT is coming to Mac's, but what Mac's have been sporting lately is a SD slot. Newer SDXC cards are coming with much larger capacities, up to 2TB and perhaps even beyond. They use exFAT, a file format designed by MS for SDXC.
The new Mac's with SD slots can access the larger capacity SDXC, BUT NOT THEIR SPEED.
According to my rough calculations the new SDXC access speed can be around twice the speed of 7,200 RPM hard drives. Making them highly desirable as bootable backups or external large storage devices replacing hard drives.
It might even be possible to use SDXC as main bootup drives.
OF course the problem is the Mac access speed, this might have to do with exFAT and Microsoft just licensed it.
Now Apple could come up with their own exFAT for SDXC, or license Microsoft's. But somehow the speed of SDXC will have to be addressed in upcoming Mac's. Or else downloading movies from your 20 megapixel camera will be very slow.
How Apple will address this issue remains to be seen, but I'm not buying a new Mac unless I know I can access the full speed of SDXC. It's the future.
Another problem is SD cards stick out the side of Mac's instead of being flush and spring released or some other method to prevent them from being forgotten and snapped off.
A flush mounted SDXC card would make a nice Time Machine or auto-clone bootable backup in case your laptop boot drive fails.