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FAT vs FAT32 vs exFAT

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Furkin
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Posted December 14, 2012 at 11:32AM

Hi all,

ASUS M5A + Phenom IIx2 + 4gb RAM + Win 7 (32) + NTFS

My Son came round yesterday with a 400gb external hdd. His game station (no idea) won't recognise the files and said to format. I lifted everything off it & tried to format it yesterday - via DOS (g: /fs:fat32).

It took all day - then it said there was no room (or similar).

Today, I've partitioned it to roughly 50/50% and am currently formatting 1 partition to FAT32 (I hope).

I never did understand the FAT /NTFS / FAT32 thing,,,, and never saw exFAT until yesterday.

What is the ultimate format for an external hdd of this size ?

If it doesn’t take this time, what am I doing wrong ?

I don't recall ever having to download a separate program to do this.

cheers guys

all the very best for the Season

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bremner

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Posted December 16, 2012 at 1:38PM

Seem to have deleted the opening line of my post. It should have started

For those who don't know about exFAT...

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lotvic

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Posted December 16, 2012 at 2:26PM

bremner, thanks for that, I've downloaded it. I'm hoping it solves my problem of large film size (over 4GB) on freesat pvr transferring to usb harddrive then to my xp pc.

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bremner

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Posted December 16, 2012 at 3:27PM

Not sure if the PVR will recognise exFAT but worth a try.

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lotvic

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Posted December 16, 2012 at 3:55PM

Yeah, I'm going to look in manual.

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woodchip

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Posted December 16, 2012 at 8:26PM

Fat32 wastes a lot of disk space when saving files, the bigger the partition the more space it wastes. NTFS or NT for short is better for new computers as long as you do not want to share files with Fat32 Win98 etc; as it cannot see NT system files, and its a lot better on the use of disc space

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