OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Storage

FAT32 - Netlabs or AN?

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Dariusz Piatkowski:
The subject says it all...what have you picked/installed, and why?

I ask b/c I have had the Netlabs 0.9.13 release on my machine from quite some time now. It has worked for me quite well since the extent of using FATanything was to simply pull the pics off of my digital camera. That's a FAT32 card, easy to mount, easy to copy off of, done!

However, as storage capacities got larger and now it's somewhat easy to have a multi-gig FAT device I figured I should perhaps update my install.

Now, here is the decision point: run with the updated Netlabs release, or move over to AN one? If I understood the AN release notes, their goal is to have the basic FAT32 capability, no other fancy stuff. Seems simple enough....but that also appears to really narrow things down to just the stuff that's pure FAT32 as opposed to having capability to mount exFAT, etc.

So I'm curious how others have gone about this? What have you deployed, why and how is that working for you?

Thanks!

ivan:
Sorry Dariusz, can't help you much there regarding use with a camera since I use Cameraderie v1.5.3 by Rich Walsh with all my Nikon DSLR cameras.  It even works with the over size card in my D60 without problems, in fact the only time I take a card out of the camera is if I need to change it because it is full and even then I replace it to get the pictures off it.

Doug Bissett:
I don't even consider using anything except the AN FAT32 driver. It seems to have a problem, or two, but nothing as bad as what 9.13 has (I don't even remember what the problems were). I did try the other one (with ExFAT, and FAT16, support), but decided that it wasn't really any better, and the FAT16 was interfering with the old OS/2 FAT16 support (not to mention the questionable legality of using it). At the time, I had no need for ExFAT, and still don't. It seems that nobody is using ExFAT anymore, even Microsoft doesn't seem to be pushing it.

Today, I use my cell phone as a camera. It takes better pictures than my old HP digital camera ever did (and that was better than my old Nikon  film cameras). I got a short adapter cable, so I could plug a USB stick into it (formatted FAT32), and copy things to that, then to my computer. At one time, I did get the phone to transfer directly, probably using Cameraderie, but that was more difficult than using the USB stick.

Martin Iturbide:
Hi

If I recall correctly, on why AN decided to fork FAT32, it was because of the exFat support on the Netlabs version. exFAT is patented by Microsoft, and even than MS pinky swear to not sue, it was too risky to include it to ArcaOS. AN does not have the resources to fight a monster like Microsoft if the want to "negotiate" a patent fee.  This is an interesting article about the exFAT patents and use license.

Regards

Lars:
I use the latest FAT32 from Netlabs.
For once, I don't have AN.
The other reason was, that I can finally format a dump partition up to 4 GB with FAT16 (by selecting a 64k cluster size) which allows to use the original OS2DUMP (that only dumps to FAT16 partitions) without the need to install DUMPFS.
There are also commandline switches that control what FAT16 partitions are served by FAT32 and which are controlled by the kernel built-in FAT16,you just have to use them.
The latest version is stable and works fine for me. The latest version is newer than the one announced on the Netlabs WIKI.

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