Tag Archives: FAT32

Vista exFAT (where has FAT32 gone?)

Computer Aid Posted on by

In a prior post, I stumbled across vistas options for formatting drives (it appears that the only choices are ntfs and exFAT).

Now thats going to cause problems with a lot of devices than need FAT32 (usb thumbdrives and mp3 players spring to mind).

So what is exFAT?

its really “FAT64”, but its totally incompatible with FAT32 and FAT16… so XP cannot handle exFAT drives.

Looks like Vista has painted itself into a corner on this (once again!)

While investigating this, I also noticed that XP artificially limits the size of (formatting) FAT32 drives to 32Gb… while FAT32 can actually handle drives up to 2Tb in size.

But I found a useful guide at: http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm which allows a disk up to 2Tb to be formatted as FAT32 (the format program even works with vista!).

Why does Acer insist on using FAT32 instead of NTFS?

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’ve recently seen a few customers with fairly new Acer computers (both laptops and desktop computers). The odd thing is that they all seem to use the FAT32 filesystem.

With one particular customer, when I started the laptop, it proceeded to perform a filesystem check (which I didn’t interrupt, as it usually takes around 5 minutes)… Well after 20 minutes, the FS check finally completed, and I was able to “start work”.

Its very frustrating, when I know that if the HDD had been using NTFS, there would probably not have been a filesystem check (or at least a much quicker one).

A quick search on the internet shows that some people believe that FAT32 is faster than NTFS… that might be so, but with the speed of todays systems, I doubt that anyone can notice the difference.

Given the reliability of NTFS and how quick it is to convert (just type convert c: /fs:ntfs)… usually around 10 minutes. I just cannot understand why FAT32 is used anymore (especially by a large company like Acer!).