Microsoft licenses exFAT to third parties
InternetNews | at | by Mike
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, told InternetNews.com. "What we've seen is a change in what consumers need," he added.