exFAT vs. FAT32

[ForeverNight]

So, I just got myself a new flash drive, a nice 8GB job by Patriot, and I was going to go and format it when I saw it.

 

[dramatic_music]exFAT[/dramatic_music]

 

Anyway, all joking aside, I was wondering if there was any good reason to leave FAT32 and go to exFAT? I'm going to be using this flash drive on four different OS's at a minimum (OSX Leopard, Ubuntu 8.1, WinXP, and WinVista) and, from the wiki article it appeared that it would only read on Vista and XP after a hotfix.

 

Anybody have any experience with exFAT and can lend me a handy helping hand here?

 

On a semi-related note, it appears that my Flash Drive buying somewhat follows Moore's Law, every flash drive I've bought has been double the space of my previous one. (My last two were actually good ones two! A Corsair Flash Voyager 4GB and this Patriot Xporter XT 8GB) The sequence was: 128MB, 256MB... and so on until now...

 

Thanks in advance for any help regarding exFAT.

[Q]

I've never even heard of exFAT.

 

You could probably just format it to FAT32 so that all of your OSes could use it, right?

[jrrtoken]

exFAT is simply a Micro$oft's proprietary answer to flash drives, much like how NTFS was to the hard drive. There are some advantages of using exFAT over FAT32, such as better file structuring, but the sacrifice is Windows-only compatibility. Since you want to be compatible with a variety of OSs, it's best to just format it to FAT32; the same goes for any other portable medium.

[ForeverNight]

I did format to FAT32, but it's nice to finally know what exFAT gains, thanks all!