NTFS or exFAT on Flash Drive

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exFAT is an upgrade to the old FAT file system type adding support for large files over 4GB in size. It became available in Windows Vista and up. It was not available in Windows XP. File size limit of 16 EiB (Limited by volume size), raised from close to 4 GiB in FAT32. Support for access control lists.

Rather than the old 32-bit addressing the exFAT file system uses 64-bit addressing. It is said that exFAT does not have as much of the operational overhead of NTFS as it lacks many features that add complexity.

The exFAT system is a closed standard that Microsoft has not released for public development. NTFS on flash memory has been known to be inefficient for quite some time. exFAT’s smaller footprint/overhead makes it ideal for this purpose. Of course, only if your definition of “ideal” allows software to be proprietary and not open source.

NTFS - New Technology File System is the default file system for drives that run modern versions of Microsoft Windows.

For USB drives, you should use exFAT if you’re in a Windows and Mac environment, and NTFS if you’re only using Windows.

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