Not possible to format harddrive to exFAT

Just wanted to add that I also did not see the option to format with exFAT when creating the partition using "Disk Management". But if I created the partition without formatting, first. Then the formatting option include exFAT.

I am using win 7 home 32 bit. I tried to format a 1tb hard drive to exfat using disk management and other methods. The command prompt will probably work but it appears to be the only way. Disk management only provides NTFS and no other. I placed the drive on an apple machine and it took less then one second to format to exfat. Drive now works with apple and microsoft. No problem. Why does microsoft not have exfat on disk management?

Supadupa wants to format a disk as exFAT to be used with both Windows and Mac. If you have a Mac, the easiest way is to format the disk in the Mac environment using Disk Utility. It takes a second.

ronhat1 said:

I am using win 7 home 32 bit. I tried to format a 1tb hard drive to exfat using disk management and other methods. The command prompt will probably work but it appears to be the only way. Disk management only provides NTFS and no other. I placed the drive on an apple machine and it took less then one second to format to exfat. Drive now works with apple and microsoft. No problem. Why does microsoft not have exfat on disk management?

perhaps exFAT was originally designed for XC (extended capacity) memory cards like SDXC, memory stick xc or any XC based usb flash drives (ex. 128gb drives); those can be formatted with exFAT but not internal hard drives (I'm not sure about SSD drives)

it's probably a "design" problem (aka. behavior by design) by MS

exFAT was designed as a lightweight alternative to FAT32 designed and optimized for flash drives and memory cards. It solves some of the problems with FAT32, such as the 4 GB file size limit. It is sometimes called FAT64. I believe at one time there were plans for adding advanced features such a file security but that is unlikely to happen. Like NTFS it is a Microsoft proprietary format and some aspects of the implementation are covered by patents. It was not intended for use with non Microsoft operating systems.

exFAT was never intended for use with internal drives where NTFS is usually a much better choice. Microsoft does not wish to encourage it's use in internal drives and for that reason it is not an option in Disk Manager. If you really wish to do so it can be done from the command line and with third party utilities. This was a deliberate design decision.