exFAT format??

First off Welcome to the seven forums!

There are two things to know first about seeing a drive formatted to the exFat file system. 1)Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and now 7 can only format any drive or partition to the NTFS or NT File System. Your friends obviously a 3rd party tool or recent MS driver update package 2) seeing the decription for that at Description of the exFAT file system driver update package

As you will see there the exFat option replaces the old Fat32 for the recent growth of removable devices like usb hard drives, flash drives, pen drives, and support for volumes over the 32gb limit seen with Fat32 itself. The term exFat refers to "extended Fat" or "extended File Allocation Tables".

chokonen888 said:

I just built a new machine and want to test my luck with Win 7 on it. The OS HD is a SSD so I am really interested in using the exFAT format. A few of my friends said they were able to format their HD's to exFAT during the Win 7 install but for some reason, while my install allows me to format the HD, it does not allow me to choose the type of format...it just formats NTFS. My other machine running Win 7 has a second HD attached...only option for formatting there is NTFS as well. So...how can I format this SSD in exFAT without pulling it out and connecting it to another machine?

In order for Windows (even 7) to format exFAT the drive has to conform to the ARMD specification Parallel ATA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia which by definition declares the drive removable rendering it ineligible for a Windows installation. In short, ask your friend for a screen shot of that option in Windows 7 setup. It should not be there.

Also, NTFS is required for Windows 7 as the OS now makes extensive use NTFS hard links between items in the WinSxS folder and their exposed conterparts in the rest of the Windows tree as well as some default Junctions used to maintain backward compatibility.

If someone did figure out how to 1) convince setup to go against it's nature and let you install on removable media 2) format it exFAT and 3) install 7 to a non-NTFS volume I'd really love to see it. Have those friends produce some proof.

As soon as anything with Fat in it was mentioned I had to post the MS link! The default installation will automatically refuse installation to external devices, drives while you create the reverse seeing Windows installed from a usb flash drive but onto an NTFS volume.

External usb hard drives for storage, flash drives made bootable for installation as well as other things allow exFat even Fat32 there. That's how they come with factory Fat volumes. The driver packages would be something to replace the software usually seen with them.

From Vista up NTFS is the native file system. XP was backward compatible to Fat16/32 there. But anything "extended" not primary is bad news to start with for Windows. They have 7 running on a virtual hard drive even while the actual physical drives see the exFat format.

Due to external hard drives and other usb devices like flash drives being cross platform between Windows and Mac quite a bit MS is simply providing the necessary driver support for XP plus Vista since January there. Any form of Fat would be going backwards rather then forward anyways as far as Windows is concerned.

you have to take into account that NTFS unlike fat32/16/exFat does write many times the last accessed metadata which in theory will wear the drive down...
although there is a simple fix for that....
TweakXP.com - Increase XP NTFS performance
while it says XP it does work in Vista and 7
although its already timestamp modification is already in 7 so there is not much performance loss from using NTFS and there should be gains from it...

Originally it was taken into consideration for XP as well as being Vista/7 capable while XP is still seeing MS support. Once XP reaches the discontinued like 9x-ME, 2K you know the rest there.

The annoying part was giong out and buying an external hard drive(now internal! with NTFS!) and finding a factory Fat32 along with the software! That had to go!