Yet another format?
Why didn't they replace the SD card format with a SATA or SAS interface when they dreamed up a now extension?
SanDisk and Seagate are shipping their largest ever storage SD cards and SATA drives respectively. Tomorrow they'll ship even larger ones. SanDisk can deliver a 64GB Ultra SDXC memory card, SDXC being the successor to the SDHC card format. You can put more than a day's worth of high-def video on the card, at 9Mbits/s speed, …
So, this is a bit like the first SDHC cards that came out before the standard had stabilized. I'll wait a couple of months for the SD4.0 standard to be ratified.
And, -tim, the SDXC has a very specific raison d'etre - namely that it is physically compatible with the SD/SDHC (and to a large extent all the flavours of MMC).
Oh, you're not forced to use exFAT, it's still just a block device, so in theory you can use ext4 or whatever you want on it. It's still a shame that the SD consortium recommend a proprietary file system.
They probably recomended exFAT so it can be read by a Windows machine without installing drivers.
That said, surely most non-technical people who buy cameras and the like install the software from a CDROM so EXT2 (or whatever) drivers could be included on this?