exFAT for XP users.

Could not decide the right forum for this so settled on General.
Anyway really for those still useing XP as already supported in Win7 and Vista.

Go here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/955704

Description self explanatory. The install went fine for me.

What are some of the reasons one would want an exFAT partition?

I'm at a loss as to why one would need this file system.
Would this make things easier to share between MS and Linux?

From what I understood after reading the short article which gave the link I posted. exFAT is most beneficial for formatting the larger capacity flash drives which are available now.
It made no reference to cross platform compatibility other then if a flash drive is formatted to exFAT then XP cannot read it unless you have the patch installed.

All I really know is that the whole idea in using FAT32 with flash drives is so Pre-XP systems can read them. From what I understand, exFAT is an extension to the FAT32 file system for greater capacities. This is shocking because if XP cannot read the exFAT partitions without a patch then neither would the Pre-XP systems.

Looking at my query further, if one only uses XP, Vista, or 7 there would not be any need for a non-NTFS partition. My only other thoughts would be a cross-platform scenario.

The article mentioned that NTFS is not as efficient for flash media as exFAT is, NTFS (on a flash drive) will make it perform slower although it did not say to what extent it has this effect.

NTFS, though more secure, on flash/pen drives & SSD causes more wear-and-tear than a FAT file structure, meaning they burn out faster so exFAT provides an extended FAT structure as an alternative to NTFS for referencing larger drives.

http://www.sevenforums.com/installat...at-format.html

Based on reading that, just don't try to install W7 OS on a exFAT formatted drive.

Tried it on one of my flash drives and true to it's description I now have an extra option for formatting a drive to exFAT. Worked fine.

I've had a couple of larger drives (16GB) formatted as exFAT, and at the time, they both worked fine. I lost one of them, and the other is in a fancy plastic case, it makes a good paperweight.

But I no longer care for flash drives of that size. 4GB ones seem to hold up longer, and are of better quality, at a reasonable price. Larger ones, if they are good, costs a lot, for a few more bucks, you could have a pocket sized backup drive, such as a WD Passport.

Usually, when you get one of the larger ones (16GB or more) for less than $20, you've been screwed. The quality isn't there for that price.

But as far as exFAT goes, I've used it a little, but not long enough determine a difference from FAT32 or NTFS.

Cat

I don't see how, since Linux supports both FAT and NTFS just fine.