I realize that as hard drives continue to grow in size, that it becomes impractical to have the external drives (USB) come preformatted from the "factory" as FAT-32. And that some (or most, or all?) external hard drives (perhaps over some certain size) come pre-formatted as NTFS. But I always thought that NTFS was proprietary to Microsoft, and that Microsoft would presumably fight very hard to obtain some sort of royalty or license fee for every and any storage device that contains their "technology" - I believe they tried very hard to sue every device maker (digital cameras, mp3 players, etc) that used internal and removable flash memory media formatted as FAT32, claiming that they held the patents for FAT32 - but I think that issue is very fuzzy in the courts. So what is the status when it comes to large external hard drives and their pre-formatted file system configuration? Is there any rule-of-thumb when it comes to size and file-system? Has the industry adopted any such standards such as, if the drive is larger than 250 or 500 gb, then it's going to come pre-formatted as NTFS? Is Microsoft getting any sort of cut because of that?
