Windows tends to use exFat anymore.
Scalability to large disk sizes: ca. 128 PB (257−1 bytes)[7][nb 2] maximum, 512 TB (249−1 bytes) recommended maximum, raised from the 32-bit limit (2 TB for a sector size of 512 bytes) of standard FAT32 partitions.[8]
Support for up to 2,796,202 files per directory.[2][nb 3] Microsoft documents a limit of 65,534 (216−2) files per sub-directory for their FAT32 implementation, but other operating systems have no special limit for the number of files in a FAT32 directory. FAT32 implementations in other operating systems allow an unlimited number of files up to the number of available clusters (that is, up to 268,304,373 files on volumes without long filenames).[nb 4]
Maximum number of files on volume C, to 4,294,967,285 (232 − 11, up from ca. 228 − 11[nb 4] in standard FAT32).
Free space allocation and delete performance improved due to introduction of a free space bitmap.
Timestamp granularity of 10 ms for Create and Modified times (down from 2 s of FAT, but not as fine as NTFS's 100 ns).[2]
Timestamp granularity for Last Access time to double seconds (FAT had date only).
Timestamps come with a time zone marker in offset relative to UTC (starting with Vista SP2).[9]
Optional support for access control lists (not currently supported in Windows Desktop/Server versions).[10]
Optional support for TexFAT, a transactional file system standard (optionally WinCE activated function, not supported in Windows Desktop/Server versions).
Boundary alignment offset for the FAT table.
Boundary alignment offset for the data region.
Provision for OEM-definable parameters to customize the file system for specific device characteristics.[11][12]
Valid Data Length (VDL): through the use of two distinct lengths fields, one for "allocated space" and the other for "valid data", exFAT can preallocate a file without leaking data that was previously on-disk.
Cluster size up to 32 MB.[13]
Metadata integrity with checksums.[clarification needed]
Template based metadata structures.[clarification needed]
Removal of the physical . and .. directory entries that appear in subdirectories.
exFAT no longer stores the short 8.3 filename references in directory structure and natively uses extended file names, whereas legacy FAT versions implement extended file names through the VFAT extension.
