Microsoft Offers exFat Licensing to Third Parties

In a move aimed at supporting future large memory capacity flash devices, Microsoft has started licensing its follow-up to the FAT file system to third parties, the company said Thursday.

Dubbed “exFAT” for “Extended File Allocation Table,” the technology is designed to enable flash memory devices to handle orders of magnitude more memory than the previous file system, known as simply FAT. Microsoft also has a file system used by Windows called NTFS but that is reserved for hard disks.

“The old file systems are not up to standards,” David Kaefer, general manager of intellectual property licensing at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), told InternetNews.com. “What we’ve seen is a change in what consumers need,” he added.

As digital devices such as camcorders, cameras, flash memory cards, and mobile phones have proliferated, the size of files and folders has burgeoned as well. Users increasingly want to store and transfer larger amounts of data in the form of pictures, video, and audio.

“The exFAT file system not only facilitates large files for use of audio/visual media, it enables seamless data portability and an easy interchange between desktop PCs and consumer electronic devices,” according to a Microsoft statement.

FAT has been around as long as MS-DOS but can only address up to 32GB of data. By contrast, exFAT supports up to 256TB. “It greatly expands the size of files that flash memory devices can handle,” the statement said.

Read the rest at Internetnews.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  December 16, 2020

• AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  December 11, 2020

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020