ExFAT Format?

[parabola]

I'm a little confused by the ExFAT format. Will any flash drive I format in Windows 7 by ExFAT and then only work on Vista/W7?

I read the wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT but I couldn't understand if it meant it was used by default.

 

[clifford_cooley]

Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 users must have Service Pack 2 or later and install an update to support exFAT
Windows Vista must be Service Pack 1 or later for exFAT support

This is basically FAT64. Chances are you will not exceed the FAT32 limits. There is no real need in anything more than FAT32 at the moment as far as flash drives.

 

[Kougar]

ExFAT is mostly for things like flash drives.... FAT32 has capacity limitations. I've not been able to test it myself but supposedly anything FAT32 can't exceed 32GB in size under XP. As USB drives and memory cards begin to exceed 32GB (they already have) it will only become more of an issue. There were also small performance and timestamp improvements with the format... really you can get a good idea from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT

 

[clifford_cooley]

This reminds me. Does this have something to do with XP not being able to format a 32GB drive where as Windows 98 could format past 100GB. I now remember reading somewhere that this was an issue created because Windows XP used NTFS as a native file system and wasn't worried to much at the time about FAT32.

 

[clifford_cooley]

As of now, fat32format has worked on disks from 40GB to 2TB

Interfaces tested include IDE/PATA, SATA, eSATA, USB and Firewire

The formatted disks work on XP, Mac, Linux, the iPod (40gb), various Nas boxes and mediaplayers and Norton Ghost 2003

Formatting works on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 and Vista. Note that Windows 9x/Me are not supported and do not work, but you can use the format.exe supplied with them instead

Read more here - http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

Commandline interface

fat32format f: -cN (parameter where N is the number of sectors per cluster)
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or Windows GUI interface

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