How do I format an internal hard drive to exFAT in Windows 10?

Question

I have an internal hard drive that I use as storage where I dump the stuff I need backed up. I want to format it to exFAT instead of NTFS so that it doesn't have to deal with permissions. The problem is, it only appears to be available to format as NTFS. Is there a way to force it to be formatted as exFAT?

Answer 1

1. By Command prompt Format D: /A:64K /FS:ExFAT

64k is cluster size, D is target drive letter.

2. By Diskpart:

   list disk

select disk '#' (where # is the number of the targer drive)

If you want that for a partition:

list part
select part # (where # is the number of the partition)
format fs=exfat -q 

If you want it for the whole drive just erase it all and make a single partition

clean
create partition primary

active (you many not need to make it active, so you can skip this)

format fs=exfat -q

Update: for Windows 10, use QUICK instead of -q

Answer 2

Open command line (CMD) and run the command below:

format X: /FS:exFAT

It basically means format the "X" Drive with exFAT Filesystem. Change the X to whatever drive letter the internal hard drive has at the moment.

There are other filesystem type, which you can check by doing format /?

Answer 3

If windows fails to format your hard drive to exFAT, you can use third-party tools to do the formatting thing for you. For example, PartitionGuru can format hard drive to exFAT as well.

Step 1: Install and run this partition manager and you can see the hard drive in the software.

Step 2: Select the hard drive you want to format and click the Format button on the tool bar.

Step 3: Select exFAT in the file system colume and then click "Format" button.

Answer 4

Well it appears that Windows 10 support for exFAT has been dropped in a recent update. The option no longer appears in the drive format dialog, nor does it appear in the diskpart utility. Any mention of exFAT has been expunged from the official diskpart documentation making me believe that Microsoft has officially terminated support for it, even so I cannot find any official announcements or confirmations of that. A very odd and stupid move IMO.

Answer 5

For a quick formatting on Windows 10 Pro 21H2, use /Q, e.g. in cmd.exe:

format Z: /A:128K /FS:ExFAT /Q

to format disk Z to the exFAT file system with 128KiB of allocation unit size (see here on allocation unit size vs. disk performance).