Why haven't I heard of exFAT format before

[JimS]

Went to transfer some large Raspberry pi sd card image files to a new pc and ran into a file too large message even though the USB stick had plenty of room. After some fiddling I figured out the problem was the file size limit for the FAT32 format of the USB stick. Even the 128 GB stick is formatted to FAT32 (not completely sure but fairly sure I haven't reformatted it). Some searching turned up exFAT which seems good and is compatible with Linux and windows. But also ran across some negative things about it but hat seemed to be primarily for larger drives as the primary OS drive. Wondering how I didn't see this earlier. Some is that I have done a lot on my main desktop and haven't had to transfer a lot of really large files (over 4GB). I saw something about windows not being able to format large drives/sticks to FAT32 - guessing it formats to NTFS but haven't dug into that. Is exFAT a good choice for USB sticks used mainly for file tranfer? I suppose I could go with NTFS because much of my work is in windows and Linux has decent NTFS support (or at least it has worked for me the few times I have tried it).

 

[pete_c]

@JimS

Happy New year to you and family!!!

Googled ...

Is exFAT a good choice for USB sticks used mainly for file transfer?
Yes, exFAT is an excellent choice for USB sticks used mainly for file transfer, especially between different systems (Windows, Mac, Linux) because it supports large files (unlike FAT32) and offers broad compatibility without needing extra software, but it's less robust than NTFS and requires careful ejection due to its lack of journaling.

I personally transfer large image files using my NAS.

 

[JimS]

Happy New Year!