exFAT support for external drives

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darrenmathews
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exFAT support for external drives

Post by darrenmathews »

Would very much like you to include exFAT support for external usb drives.
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by fantomas »

exFAT is patent-pending technology, so I doubt it will be ever supported ...
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igel2805
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by igel2805 »

more than one year ago! ExFat? Now Supported or a future feature?
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by schumaku »

AS the previous poster correctly mentioned: exFAT is a proprietary file system, patent pending, owned by Microsoft.

There is no reasonable open source implementation (due to the licensing), which can be integrated into Linux in general.

There are some 3rd-party implementations available - which cost reasonable $$$. All for a very niche application?

Where is the effective use on a NAS?
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by igel2805 »

Hi schumaku!

thanks for your response, can you give me an alternative to exfat where i am able to use an external drive for OSX, Windows and Linux (QNAP) in read write mode?

BR Martin
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by fantomas »

well, sure not for linux - if there was support on linux, it would most probably) be on QNAP too.
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LarsN
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by LarsN »

This has already been added to the feature request list via a different thread and it's being discussed internally. The only issue here is that exFAT isn't free, so QNAP would have to license support from Microsoft for it to be possible to implement support.
However, as more and more devices are starting to support exFAT, it's something that would have to be supported sooner or later.
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beneix
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by beneix »

+1

This would be very useful. I am not a programmer, nor a copyright expert, but there seem to be some Linux-oriented solutions out there:

How to enable exFAT in Ubuntu
Free exFAT file system implementation on Google Code

Would not these point to a way of implementing this on QNAP without the need to pay Microsoft?
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by LarsN »

Regardless if it's a free implementation, we'd have to pay a license fee to Microsoft for using it.
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by schumaku »

It's not the exFAT code that is copyrighted - it's the on-disk structure...
nalor
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by nalor »

+1

Would like to see exFAT support!
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pwilson
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by pwilson »

schumaku wrote:It's not the exFAT code that is copyrighted - it's the on-disk structure...
I'm sure QNAP could pay the $600,000.00USD Licence Fee to Paragon Software Group for QNAP SmartPhone Apps, and the "per-device" licence fee for every QNAP NAS device produced if they wanted to. Of course Mac and Linux QNAP owners would get pretty upset that the retail price of a QNAP NAS has to increase to pay for this. Check out Wikipedia article: ExFAT.

IMHO, ExFAT support should only be provided for End-Users willing to pay for it. I personally have no desire to pay such licence fees either directly or indirectly, so I hope that this functionality is never added to the QNAP Firmware. End-Users that want support for ExFAT can always migrate to Microsoft Server solutions if they favour using expensive closed-source software.

ExFAT is great for people willing to actually "pay" for it, but I'd prefer to never pay for it, so I'm quite happy to live without it.

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mlynchit
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by mlynchit »

LarsN wrote:Regardless if it's a free implementation, we'd have to pay a license fee to Microsoft for using it.
Wouldn't the same logic apply to NTFS?
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by schumaku »

mysteryliner wrote:...All i care about is results/ workability !
So why not simply using the NAS for what it's intended, storing and accessing the data there instead of using an Adidas/Puma/Nike/Timberlands network?

As the mountain does not move to the prophet - move the prophet (read OS X) to the mountain use NTFS using a 3rd party solution?

Or what about the last user moving the data from the USB device to the NAS over the network? The N in NAS means Network - not aNydisk server.

Yes, I would appreciate QNAP would make a license deal with Microsoft - not only for the NAS, but also for QGenie, where many usage case would require performant exFAT access.

What about say a US$ 10 one-off fee per QNAP device to back an exFAT license?

PS. Patrick, neither Paragon nor Tuxera does issue the activation code for exFAT if the requester does not have a license agreement with Microsoft.
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Re: exFAT support for external drives

Post by pwilson »

schumaku wrote:PS. Patrick, neither Paragon nor Tuxera does issue the activation code for exFAT if the requester does not have a license agreement with Microsoft.
I am aware of this. Hence the observation about the huge licence fee.

If Microsoft wanted exFAT to be universal they would provide more favourable licence pricing. This is an effort by Microsoft to put us under their "closed source/proprietary" filesystems again, and this is just wrong. We do not need it. As you already stated the "N" in NAS is for network. It doesn't matter what the underlying filesystem is if it is being accessed via the network, so why should we subsidize Microsoft at all.

Microsoft doesn't even understand why filenames should be "case sensitive", so I definitely don't want any filesystem they design at any price.

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