Should i format exfat

Pylsa Pylsa Karan Whichever one my father has. The reason you may have gotten this advice is that usually removable storage is flash memory. In this case NTFS's journaling reduces your drive's life. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Cluster size up to 32 MiB allowing for larger partitions at the cost of more file slack File size limit of 16 EiB Limited by volume size , raised from close to 4 GiB in FAT32 Better support for video editing and large archives Free space allocation and delete performance improved due to introduction of a free space bitmap much better performance than FAT32 Support for access control lists so you can control file access if you want but I suspect the main use would be for USB devices where you just want people to access it go figure Provision for OEM-definable parameters to customize the file system for specific device characteristics for use in embedded devices with specific needs What Microsoft developers have basically done is update the FAT32 file system to exFAT, moving from bit addressing to bit addressing, to offer an improved speed alternative over moving to NTFS at the same time making it possible to create, store or transfer huge files, files greater than 4GiB.

Some of the missing and effectively useless or a waste for removable media features include: Alternate Data Streams File Compression Journaling The only drawbacks to exFAT are that Microsoft has not released it into the public, requiring that companies licence it for use on their devices.

Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Where's the comparison to NTFS? It seems unused most of the time - wikipedia says it's supported on Windows CE only.

Anyways, the point is that a file system that doesn't apply file ownership and permissions at least, not by default is a perfect candidate for removable storage media, since you can't predict which users will run on the systems you plug it in. Show 1 more comment. Adrian B Adrian B 4 4 silver badges 3 3 bronze badges. RomanSt RomanSt 8, 14 14 gold badges 54 54 silver badges 72 72 bronze badges.

That's actually incorrect information. Because exFAT supports file encryption at least when used with Windows Just as you mentioned it can be very annoying or just great. Laurent Laurent 1, 1 1 gold badge 11 11 silver badges 13 13 bronze badges. This is especially useful information for me, and upvoted. I came to this question googling "which filesystem is better from a recovery point of view". Also, In my subsequent experience with recovering data from corrupt drives… in NTFS recovery chances are better and file integrity remains intact considerably.

Should also be noted that support on linux is more limited and flawed, even with the fuse filesystem, due to legal problems, lack of interest, and bugs in the exfat fuse implementation. So I would definitely not say that portability is much better than ntfs.

I use paragon without problems for years. I used fuse but I found some issue years ago and preferred to avoid using it to move data to my backup HDs. So does exFAT. The exFat drive I have only allows 11 so my response was based on that. EXFAT Recovery: as links to files continuation may be lost, the recovery result for files with the size of several blocks can be incomplete.

Broken link. SimonEast definitely less compatible, usually not shipped on linux due to license. Windows use NTFS system drive and, by default, for most non-removable drives.

Report a Bug. Previous Prev. Next Continue. Home Testing Expand child menu Expand. SAP Expand child menu Expand. Web Expand child menu Expand. Must Learn Expand child menu Expand. Big Data Expand child menu Expand. Live Project Expand child menu Expand. AI Expand child menu Expand. Toggle Menu Close. Search for: Search. In contrast, exFAT will work on the vast majority of devices you use, but may not be compatible with everything.

The older the device, the less likely it is to work with exFAT. Note that for game consoles, these file systems mainly apply for playing media and making backups. If you want to use them for game storage, you'll typically need to format the drive using the console's formatting tool, which puts it in a proprietary format.

Some Linux distros don't support exFAT out of the box, but you can add support with a quick command. If you have files that are larger than this, FAT32 isn't a good choice. This isn't a major problem right now unless you have high-capacity drives, but will become more limiting as time goes on. In contrast, exFAT has no practical limitations on file sizes or partition sizes. Its maximum file size is far beyond anything you would encounter in today's world. This makes exFAT the best choice for any portable drives that store large files and connects to different computers.

It was slightly behind in the disk space analysis test, but not by much. It's pretty easy to determine which file system you should use for an external drive.

Ask yourself two questions:. Unless you can answer "yes" to both questions, you should format the drive as exFAT. Otherwise, go with FAT32 for compatibility purposes. Formatting erases everything on a disk, so it's a pain to change a drive's file system down the road.