exFAT vs NTFS?

[Ben]

I've started running a large SD card as a "second drive" of sorts on my laptop. Larger SD cards are all formatted as exFAT. It appears that exFAT is supposed to aid in read/write speed, but I haven't found out how much, or if I reformat to NTFS, if it would run significantly slower. I'd prefer to have everything NTFS, but if there are no negatives to keeping the card exFAT (for use on a computer only) and there are some positives, I'll keep it as exFAT. There will be files larger than 4GB on the card.

Thoughts?

[Phyphor]

Depending on what you wish to do with it, exFAT is superior in most ways.

However, NTFS does provide things like mirroring & security features that exFAT does not.  If this is not a concern for you on your flashdrive, I'd go with exFAT.  NTFS does incur somewhat more overhead, and overhead means less actual storage space available to you. 

Fault tolerance is also a bit more of an issue with exFAT unless you activate TFAT, IIRC.

But, given what usually gets stored on flash drives, I doubt this will be much of an issue...

[zxcvbob]

AFAIK exFAT file systems are not journalled, so be careful about not unplugging the card in the middle of a write or you can lose/corrupt data.

(it doesn't seem to be a problem with FAT32, so it might mostly be an imaginary problem)

[Phyphor]

Yeah, depending on the OS, the way FAT/FAT32 handles are, well, handled usually is pretty safe.  Generally, they're "closed" right after a write (but again, this is OS dependent!) If you DO lose some data doing this, you'll have to run CHKDSK or a similar utility to recover the lost clusters on that drive.  (Generally, that just means the file was written but wasn't properly closed/added to the FAT system,)