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I have external HDD that around 7 years old and decided to reformat it. I heard that exFAT is good for flash drives and keeps sectors alive longer, do this applies for external hard drive also? Any benefits from using exFAT on external HDD, instead of NTFS? I don't need file and folders access control of NTFS.

Kosmo零
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3 Answers3

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NTFS is superior to exFAT in many ways.

Only reason it's preferable on flash drives is because it is for example not editing the (file allocation tables) FAT for contiguous files and thus causing less wear on NAND cells. This is wear specific to NAND flash drives and so this advantage does not offer any benefits for a spinning drive. Also compared to FAT(32) cluster allocation is quicker due to use of a cluster bitmap.

With regards to SSDs which after all are also NAND flash based drives, the main disadvantage vs NTFS is that at least Windows operating systems will not 'TRIM' exFAT file systems while they do NTFS formatted drives. So IF OS supports TRIM (moderns Windows versions do) and hardware supports TRIM, you'd want to go NTFS rather than exFAT.

Again, this NAND flash wear phenomena is not a factor to take into consideration when dealing with spinning disks.

So, if using a non trimming NAND flash based device (USB pendrives, memory cards) exFAT has certain advantages over NTFS (reduced wear). On top of that many cameras only accept FAT32 or exFAT. In all other cases I'd recommend using NTFS.

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Based on these benchmarks I do not see any benefit of ExFAT over NTFS. NTFS is faster. Of course there are some drawbacks like slightly bigger OS load (especially context switching) but on contemporary system I do not believe will intact overall performance.

Romeo Ninov
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exFAT is the new generation of FAT32 file system. it's better and larger limitation (16 exabyte file size limitation), it allows you to have bigger allocation and partitions size. so yah, you'll see more improvements on using it. Also, the one thing that I like is that exFAT is readable / writable on all systems, which means if you have Windows and you try to use the external HDD on Mac (or the opposite way) you won't have to reformat the drive so the OS can give you a full access on it !.

exFAT will give you better access control than the NTFS, better performance than the other FAT and NTFS systems. Best solution for external storage especially for flash-based system.

Read More about exFAT Source 1 Source 2 Source 3 Source 4

Would I recommend it for you ? Defenately YES.

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