Linux's exFAT File-System Driver Can Now "FSCK" As Fast As Windows

Samsung engineers responsible for the modern exFAT file-system driver for Linux have updated the adjoining "exfatprogs" user-space programs around this file-system. Notable to exfatprogs-1.0.4 is much faster "fsck" file-system checking support.

Namjae Jeon of Samsung announced the 1.0.4 exfatprogs release today and noted that "the performance of fsck have been much improved". This now leads to the FSCK performance being close to Windows' own FSCK performance and much better than the former exfat-fuse FSCK checking. Both exfatprogs and the Windows fsck take around 11 seconds while the former exfat-fuse FSCK implementation takes more than one minute to complete in tests on microSDXC storage.

The updated exFAT user-space programs release also adds a new option to support aligning the start offset of FAT and data clusters, repairing zero-byte files with the "NoFatChain" attribute, better displaying of information from the fsck.exfat command, and other improvements.

The exFAT FSCK repair support is expected to be in good shape for the next user-space programs release.

More details on this tooling update via the release announcement.