This week I started getting to know a whole bunch of wireless geeks in preparation for Wireless Field Day in March. I also wrote about Light Peak, my search for an AirPrint-compatible printer, and some more on the iPad. On the enterprise IT side, I covered Application Performance Monitoring (with a special offer from SolarWinds) and Dell’s potential acquisition of Compellent.
exFAT
Is The iPad Compatible With SDXC and ExFAT Cards?
After Apple added SDXC and ExFAT compatibility to Mac OS X in 10.6.5, I got to wondering if they had added similar compatibility to the iPad in iOS 4.2.1. Although the hardware reader is probably not SDXC-capable, it wouldn’t have been too hard to add the ExFAT driver from Mac OS X to iOS. Then, the iPad could import from SD cards formatted as ExFAT and USB-connected cameras.
Introducing SDXC and exFAT in Apple Mac OS X
SDXC and its partner, exFAT, are on the rise and gaining support in the latest digital cameras. New Sony models like my NEX-5 add SDXC support, as do new models from Canon, Nikon, and others. Photographers are mainly interested in the increased speed and capacity of these cards, but many will face a challenge when trying to use them in their Macintosh computers. Thankfully, it looks like Apple is moving just as rapidly to support SDXC and exFAT!
An Introduction To exFAT
Microsoft already gave the world FAT and NTFS, and both have become common in the non-Windows world thanks to flash drives, SD cards, and portable disks. But the folks from Redmond are now introducing a new filesystem, exFAT. Do we really need a new filesystem?
