Considering the multi-terabyte drives that people are buying, exFAT is a terrible format. Combined with plugging into usb ports and unpredictably being unplugged, it can be corrupted and completely made unusable with an errant tug on a cable. All those files, photos, videos, all gone.

You should never, ever, EVER use exFAT for anything that you care about. I made that mistake and lost a 250GB of data because of it. I regret ever trusting this format. The only reason I did was because I wanted a removable drive that I can use with windows and mac. But what I got was a huge amount of data loss and a terrible pain of regret.

Okay lets see why,

FAT32, NTFS and exFAT are three different files systems used to store data in a storage device, created by Microsoft.

NOTE: A file system is basically a set of rules used to decide how data is stored and fetched in a storage device, be it a hard drive, flash drive, etc.

1. FAT32 being the oldest, have limitation on single file size i.e., a file with >4GB can’t be transferred or copied.
2. NTFS overcame this limitation by providing the file size limit (theoretically) 1 billion GB or 1 Exabyte.

So why cant we use just NTFS everwhere?

We can’t, because of its compatibility.

• FAT32 is compatible with: Windows, Mac, Linux, gaming consoles, practically any device with a USB port.
• NTFS is compatible with: Windows, Mac (Read-only), Linux (read-only for some distributions), Microsoft Xbox One.

So NTFS since developed by Microsoft, it has some limitations on Mac and Linux operating systems.

Here comes, exFAT, an extendedFAT file system

• exFAT can be used where the NTFS file system is not a feasible solution.
• It is lighter in contrast to NTFS and supports file of sizes, more than 4GB.
• So, if you have an exFAT SD card, you shall face no issues while copying full-length HD movies on it which is not the case with FAT32
• Importantly it is compatible with: >=Windows XP, >=Mac OSX 10.6.5, Linux (using FUSE), Android.

So to answer your question, a removable media should be formatted in a format that is compatible with different operating systems. Hence exFAT is better than NTFS.

Lets see another reason,

A benchmark study conducted by Flexense Software solution

In X-axis, T# indicated Test number. The details of the tests are

• Test 1 - Small Files Write To USB Disk Test (18,000 Files, 1 GB of Data)
• Test 2 - Small Files Read From USB Test (18,000 Files, 1 GB of Data)
• Test 3 - Medium Files Write To USB Disk Test (100 Files, 1GB of Data)
• Test 4 - Medium Files Read From USB Disk Test (100 Files, 1 GB of Data)
• Test 5 - Large Files Write To USB Disk Test (10 Files, 1 GB of Data)
• Test 6 - Large Files Read From USB Disk Test (10 Files, 1 GB of Data)
• Test 7 - Disk Space Analysis Test (20,000 Files, 4 GB of Data)
• Test 8 - Duplicate Files Search Test (20,000 Files, 4 GB of Data)
• Test 9 - File Delete Operations Test (20,000 Files, 4 GB of Data)

So we can see that exFAT outperforms NTFS when medium sized files are being transferred, which happens most of the time for removable media.

Therefore, for a removable media exFAT seems to be better than NTFS. And also exFAT has been adopted by the SD Card Association as the default file system for SDXC cards larger than 32GB

Footnotes

exFAT should only be used for flash drives, and then only when interchanging them between computers. It’s a legacy format, *for this purpose* and should not be used for anything else.

Why? Because all of the File Allocation Table (FAT) filesystem variants have a huge vulnerability: the table can be corrupted by a bad write (like a write during a power failure), and then what blocks are allocated and what aren’t…is lost info.

NTFS distributes the allocation and directory information, and is a journalling file system, which means that writes are written to a journal so that if the write is interrupted, the journal can be used to complete the write and make the file system state consistent.

Now, that said: NTFS is very Windows-centric, and is not well supported off the Windows platform. (Yes, you absolutely can get solid supported drivers for most platforms, but it’s extra work.) For this reason alone, exFAT is very useful for data interchange. But don’t count on it for long term storage, it’s an accident waiting to happen. That’s speaking from personal experience. It wasn’t fun.

Fat32 provides relatively small maximum partition sizes, with modern drive capacities in mind, and the modern maximum capacity of SDUC cards is potentially much greater than FAT 32 provides, as high as 128TB, which makes FAT32 ineffective.

Fat32:
Introduced: August 1996
Min size: 32MB
Maximum size: 2TB (with 512 byte sectors), 8TB (with 2KB sectors), 16TB (with 4KB sectors)
Maximum file size: 2GiB (gibibyte),
Maximum number of files: 268,173,300
Maximum file name length: 255 characters
Allowed filename characters: ASCII
Maximum directory depth: 32 levels
Annotation provided: Modified/creation date/time, last accessed date, deletion date/time
Date range: 1980–01–01->2099–12–31

~ There are date issues with FAT.

exFAT, on the other hand;
Introduced: late 2006 in Windows CE 6.0, and in Vista SP1 on Feb 4, 2008.
Min size: 10MB
Max size: 128PB (128000 TB),
Maximum file size: 128PB (128000 TB),
Maximum number of files: 2,796,202 per directory
Maximum file name length: 255 characters
Allowed filename characters: All Unicode characters except U+0000->U+001F (US) { /,\,:,*,?,”,<,>,|}
Date Range: 1980–01–01 -> 2107–12–31

Answer to “What are the benefits of using FAT32 instead of exFAT when formatting an SD card?:

Fat32 limits the number of files, in entirety, to 268 million, WHEREAS exFAT limits files on a per-directory model to ~2.7 million, but has no limit regarding the number of files in total;
This means that it can be advantageous to use FAT32 in a situation where you need more than 2.7 million files in a single directory. Overall, that appears to be the only benefit to using it.
I haven’t used FAT32 since I needed partitions greater than 2TB, since around 2005 or so.

THAT SAID Fat32 does provide significant interoperability with PCs, MACs and Linux, so that does make it valuable for universal purposes, HOWEVER so is exFAT, so… I don’t really see it as practical with modern technology, though use-cases do vary.

exFAT is simpler, no journal to write is the big one, so writes by nature should be faster, the less writes also prolongs the flash longevity.

I have seen many articles which have benchmarked and kind of dispute my logic tho so what about my experience?

I recently got a new usb3 stick, and originally made it exFAT, copied data to it and it flied along for large files like iso’s (this was with write caching off so true write performance).

For small files it seemed slow.

Then for a technical reason I had to switch it to ntfs. So obviously also had to copy the data to it again, the exact same files.

This time on ntfs, the large files were much slower, the main difference been they would could copy a bit fast, then suddenly slow down, then speed up again, then slow down, so the graph was wavy, whilst on exFAT it was full steady speed all the way.

Ironically tho small files do seem to write faster vs exFAT.

No compression, and as with exFAT write cache disabled.

Also for some reason with ntfs if I remove the usb stick after I am done, and then put it back in I may get a corruption warning popup, even tho write caching is disabled (meaning all writes should be done when copying is done), this never ver happens with exFAT, this means possibly ntfs is using some kind of lazy write mechanism which is active even without write caching enabled, so if using ntfs, one should probably always use the windows eject feature feature before removing the stick, which is less convenient and obviously what most people wont bother doing when using usb sticks.

Which is better, exFAT or NTFS?

Personally, my answer is going to be exFAT.

NTFS is great …if you are using Windows. If you are using something other than Windows, it’s … not so great.

exFAT works with pretty much any OS and everyone can just hop right in and start ‘doing stuff’ on a drive formatted with exFAT. exFAT - Wikipedia Heck, even an iPad can use a drive with exFAT on it. Plus there is no read only condition (like NTFS and Mac OS) and it is readily accessible by all of the major OSes, that makes exFAT a better option to me.

If you are using a drive with only one OS, stick to the native preferred format for your OS (such as NTFS for Windows). If you are going to be sharing the drive with multiple people and have no idea what they are using for their OS, use exFAT.

Is it a good idea to turn my 1.8TB external hard drive from exFAT to NTFS format if I wanna transfer my files faster? What is the difference between exFat and NTFS format?

If you are using your external hard drive with Android then I would leave it as is. NFTS is not supported by Android and depending on what/how you are using it that may create an issue, but if not then it would be worth reformating if you have a backup of anything you have on the drive now. You will gain more than just faster downloads.

“NTFS file system consistently shows better efficiency and lower CPU and system resource usage when compared to the exFAT file system and the FAT32 file system, which means file copy operations are completed faster and more CPU and system resources are remaining for user applications and other operating system tasks”

Footnotes

ExFAT isn't necessarily better. It very much depends on your needs. I'd say NTFS is much better, generally speaking, as it is safer and supports a ton of features ExFAT doesn't.

However, ExFAT's footprint is smaller, no journaling etc., so less overhead on the removable media. Which would also make it a tad faster I suppose if you're in a hurry to eject the media.

I'm not sure how Windows implements the typical NTFS lazy write feature (update in memory but write to media later) on removable media. For ExFAT the structures are updated immediately on the removable media. I don't know if this is true for NTFS. In any event, properly ejecting via Windows is a must, not just yank the media out to avoid data corruption.

Another good reason to use ExFAT is support on other OS such as Mac. However if you want the best cross platform support I actually recommend you use FAT32 instead ! (e.g. if you want to be able to plug it in a TV or setup box etc.)

Performance wise, I Googled this myself, but I found this, which is interesting: FAT32 vs. exFAT vs. NTFS USB3 Performance Comparison

Q: Why is NTFS faster than exFat? (I tested a USB flash drive and got R/W: exFAT = 195/18MB/s and NTFS = 220/25MB/s)

On the face of it, exFAT should be faster than NTFS as NTFS journals every structural change to the file system before making the actual changes. Because of this journaling, NFS will wear out a USB flash drive faster than exFAT.

I suspect the reason for the difference lies in the allocation unit size of the two file systems. NTFS normally uses an allocation unit of 4 KiB, while exFAT chooses an allocation unit size depending on the size of the file system being used. For an 8 GB pen drive, my PC chooses an allocation unit size or 32 KiB for exFAT. On a 64 GB pen drive, it chooses 128 KiB for exFAT but still chooses 4 KiB for NTFS. These sizes can be overridden.

I did not notice any significant difference between the write speeds of FAT32, exFAT or NTFS, and certainly nothing like the 39% faster writes you seem to have got with NTFS. You claim a read speed increase of 13%, which can make sense as a larger AU size read may mean the OS has to work harder to find a suitably sized space for the read to go to without fragmenting the read across several memory pages.

The same could be happening the other way round for writes. The OS has to work out where all the data is coming from to write the much larger exFAT AU size.

As Windows normally uses 4 KiB pages in RAM, there is no issue reading or writing a RAM page to an NTFS AU. but having to locate 32 RAM pages for an AU on a 64 GB exFAT pendrive might involve significantly more work. Depending on the speed of the drive, this may not be significant. A slow drive on a fast PC will probably show little variation with different file system formats. but a fast drive on a slow PC may make exFAT appear significantly slower.

Let’s consider all 3 options.

FAT32. Portable file system, basically anything can read or write to it. For cross-OS compatibility it’s the ultimate winner. Issues with large files.

exFAT. Less portable, but Windows and macOS can handle them. Large files and large storage devices work just fine (my 5TB hard drive came preformatted as exFAT, and I could fill it up with a single file if I wanted to).

NTFS. Not portable, Windows has higher performance on it. macOS can access it read only, Linux can do read-write but the driver is slightly unreliable (usually in the sense that it refuses to do jack shit if there’s even a modicum of a chance to corrupt it). Also Windows by default enables write caching so you cannot yank NTFS formatted flash drives from your system.

NTFS is just a more comprehensive file system. One which includes things like journaling (to avoid certain types of corruption), access control, encryption, and built-in compression.

ExFAT is pretty much the simplest possible file system available. It does little else than store files.

If you have no other requirements than to copy files onto and off of the drive, the ExFAT is perfectly adequate. NTFS might actually make it go slower, since it would be doing more work for each file.

I fear, if you feel files transfer too slowly. It’s more a case of the drive being slow, or the fact that it’s plugged into a slow external port. The file system isn’t going to solve that. And certainly not by using an even more strenuous file system like NTFS.

The only thing NTFS might boost on speed, is that it tries to avoid fragmenting files, where none of the FAT based file systems even consider avoiding it. However, this would only come to play if you’re modifying files instead of simply copying them onto and off of the drive.

It would be far quicker to list the advantages of exFAT over NTFS:

• It requires a minimum one write instead of 2–3 when writing to a file, decreasing flash wear,
• It’ll run just fine on a camera with 16MB of RAM, and
• It requires a tiny bit less formatting overhead.

That’s pretty much it. It’s leaps and bounds better than FAT32, in fact it’s almost everything you can ask for in a modern non-journaled filesystem.

But NTFS, despite being designed for 30 year old spinning rust, is still better today for most uses that aren’t a digital camera starved for memory:

• By far the most important is that it’s journaled, which is all that stands between you and losing your data or OS if the power goes out at the wrong time,
• Multiple copies of the file table and other filesystem metadata for additional redundancy,
• It stores lots of small files far more efficiently with much smaller cluster sizes and a file table capable of storing tiny files,
• ACLs are supported (they technically exist in exFAT but are unimplemented),
• and some nice things like transparent encryption and compression and streams and quotas and hard links that are nice to have but not everyone uses.

Well, I guess that last one isn’t quite true, since Windows requires NTFS (or ReFS optionally on servers) since it makes extensive use of hard links to save space in system folders.

Nope. It’s really the most simplistic and inferior file system used these days. It is no better than FAT32, just that it uses a larger address integer to state where on the disk a file resides nd how large that file is. I.e. it uses 64bits instead of the 32bits in FAT32. Other than that, the two systems are exactly the same. I.e. it’s based on the original FAT file system which was intended as a stop gap solution (quick-fix) for someone in the 70s. Never really intended to be a full fledged file system.

Nearly anything else would be a step up. Most would be a giant leap forward. There’s no attempt in any sort of FAT to make sure errors don’t occur. Never mind recovering from them. There’s nothing like security and encryption. It doesn’t even save access rights. It might be “stable”, but only because it does nearly nothing. The trouble is that the data is less stable because nothing is done to make it secure or give it any form of integrity.

The only possible reason to use it is because it may be compatible with some other operating system. Though in that case FAT32 beats it, since there’s more OSs capable of working with FAT32 than ExFAT.

Q: Why do you need to format an SSD in exFAT or FAT32 instead of NTFS?

Where did you get this bizarre restriction on the file formats to use on an SSD?

FAT32 on small pendrives and exFAT on large pendrives are often recommended, but I haven’t seen it as a recommendation for an SSD.

The total write life of an SSD together with its wear levelling features should give significantly more than five years life for a typical SSD usage,

Especially if you are using an operating system that can blue screen at the most inconvenient times, then using a journaling file system offers the best protection for your data. FAT32 and exFAT are non-journaling, while NTFS is a journaling file system that is far better at protecting data when an operating system has sudden major problems.

Based on my personal experience, No.

I used exFAT to format my external HDD. The annoying result is that it is now only readable by my computer. Not everybody can read exFAT. So it is useless.

I cannot use it as media storage either. No media player can read, except the one on my computer. No TV, No Media Player box can read it. I already put so many files in there, so converting it to other format will require me to move them out somewhere, reformat, and put them back in. Well, this was several years ago. Now may be different, I will let anybody else find out. Without significant advantage, I would stick to good the old NTFS.

Again, that was several years ago. I would use it again someday perhaps, if I am forced to.

They’re both kind of garbage, but, if this is for Windows, then NTFS. At least it supports the file permissions and stuff that Windows needs, and is a journaling filesystem, meaning it should be less likely to get corrupted from a power outage.

However, if this is an external SSD, that you intend to connect to other devices, like TVs and BluRay players and what not, then those can’t handle NTFS, you will need to use exFAT, and pray that you don’t lose your data.

If you’re worried about the journal in NTFS burning a hole in your SSD, don’t, any decent modern SSD has wear leveling algorithms. This is only a problem with flash cards, not with SSDs.

Allocation unit size is the block size for each block. The decision of which size to set it at is a matter of balance between speed and not wasting harddrive space.

For example say you set your allocation unit size to 4MB. And you want to put in a file of size 3MB. Then it will fit into that slot, with 1MB wasted (4–1). And then you want to put a file of size 7MB in. It will full use one block (4MB) and then use 3MB of the a second block. The second block will be wasting 1MB (4–3). The average wastage for each file in this drive will be 2MB (4MB/2). So if you are putting in 100 files into this drive, you expect to waste 200MB (100X2).

It is up to you. In general for big hard drives (1TB+) you would want to be aggressive, especially if the speed is only 5400rpm, to make up for their slow speeds. And for microsd, flash drives and SSD (less than 512mb) you would want to be more conservative to preserve space and reduce wastage.

Look at the files you will be storing on it. What is the medium size (total files size/# of files)?

Here is where you have to decide to be aggressive or not. But even if you are aggressive, in general you would want 97.5% space efficiency. That is you are wasting less than 2.5% of the space of your files.

What I usually do is just to take medium/20 and then round down (smaller). That is because 5/100=1/20, which is 5%. The space wastage averages to half of the size of each allocated slot. For example a 32kb allocation will have a average wastage of 16kb (32/2). So your space wastage will be no more than 2.5% if you take medium/20.

If you want to be more conservative you can go (smallest+medium)/40. Then you reduce the wastage to 1.25% (2.5/100=1/40). But you will be at a slower speed than medium/20.

Formula:

Your medium file size
________________________________________________
(100% ÷ % of space wastage you chose) ÷ 2

or

2 X (Your medium file size) X (% of space wastage you chose)
___________________________________________________________________
100%

Example: Your files has a total size of 2.3GB (2300MB). There are 1386 files. So the medium size is 1.659MB/File. Dividing that by 20 (for 97.5% efficiency) you will have 0.08295MB/file, or roughly 82.95kb. Rounding down (to the next smaller level) you have 64kb. This is the size your should set it at. You can confidently know that you have less than 2.5% space wastage per file.

Every file you have would waste roughly 32kb (64kb/2). With 1386 files you will be wasting 44,352kb, or 44.352MB. 44.352MB is less than 2.5% of 2300MB

Alternatively you can be more aggressive and round up to 128kb. But just know that you will have less than 95% efficiency (or more than 5% space wastage). The benefit of course is that your drive would read faster than if you set it at 64kb.

exFAT allows much bigger file sizes, and it’s a modern filing system designed for the flash storage like SSDs and SDHC cards, unlike FAT which is pretty crude and was mostly designed for simplicity and low specification computers.

exFAT is now fairly well supported by all sorts of things, and large cards (over 32GB) will generally come formatted as that.

Anecdotally, my Lumix G6 camera has a 64GB card in it, and if I format it legacy FAT it won’t touch the card and says it needs to be formatted, and does so as exFAT, so in some cases exFAT is your only choice.

That all said, it probably doesn’t really matter that much depending on what you’re going to be storing, only if you want massive video files will it make a difference.

The thread isn't new, but I've recently had a marathon of disk reformatting for a future platform change, and one thing is clear: exFAT is not my ally.

With _no_ other format have I ever had as many problems as with exFAT, even taking into account the limitations of FAT32 the latter is definitely a better solution when handling files not exceeding 4 GB.

exFAT is so problematic that it even happened that the computer wouldn't complete BIOS booting until I unplugged the external exFAT-formatted drives (admittedly, I never had this problem with one kind, namely WD Elements, but all the others once allowed booting to complete and at other times hung the computer completely disabling even USB so I was only left with a hard reset).

Unfortunately I haven't found any good solution, so for the moment I have a mix of NTFS and various GNU/Linux related formats. Fortunately, this one supports NTFS so I don't have a big problem either.

:)

The speed depends on the USB port version and the size of the file and how the drive is formatted (as in sector sizes). FAT is the oldest and slowest, but it works with just about every platform. If you format with very large sector sizes, you can increase your read / write speed but you might sacrifice empty (sector) space on the drive on smaller files.

Also, you never format your internal drives with FAT or exFAT - for windows you must use NTFS.

In comparison, the journaling NTFS is more stable and secure in data storage and quicker in file finding due to its advanced features. Due to data-structure overhead, exFAT is better than NTFS, and it outperforms when used in flash memory, especially for cross-platform file transfer.

exFAT is an extension of FAT32, and is probably not as widely used as NTFS and is certainly less widely used than FAT32. By widely used I mean supported by different operating systems.

If the maximum file size is less than 2 GiB and the file system size is less than 2 TiB, then FAT32 is probably better than exFA

Both exFAT and NTFS remove these size limits. NTFS is a journaling file system, which means that it creates a record of what it is going to change before actual changes are made. If an update to the filesystem is interrupted, then this may happen while the record of planned changes is being written. If this is interrupted then it is simply discarded the next time the file system mounts. If the actual update to the file system itself gets interrupted, then the record is replayed and this will complete the update correctly. Although a file in an NTFS file system may not be fully written, the actual structure of the file system is preserved.

exFAT and FAT32 file systems may suffer actual structural corruption in the event of an interruption during an update.

exFAT involves significantly fewer writes than NTFS, and is probably better for preserving the total life of USB pen drives than NTFS. Hard disks are immune to the extra writes. In an SSD, the use of wear levelling and large total bytes written (TBW) are offered. SSDs will eventually start to suffer but typical lives for SSDs should exceed 10 years in an office environment. Few PCs are expected to be used for that time.

Yes, an SSD can be formatted as exFAT or FAT32. To format an SSD as exFAT or FAT32, you can use the built-in Disk Management tool in Windows or the Disk Utility tool in MacOS. But the question is why do you want to format the SSD to exFAT or FAT32?

exFAT or FAT32 is a format commonly used for removable storage. This format has disadvantages such as:

1. File size limitation: exFAT and FAT32 has a maximum file size of 4GB, which can be an issue if you plan on storing large files, such as videos or high-resolution images.
2. Security: exFAT and FAT32 does not have security features such as encryption, which can be a concern if you plan on storing sensitive data on the drive.

Indeed, one of the main benefits of formatting an SSD as exFAT or FAT32 is that these file systems are compatible with a wide range of devices and operating systems, including Windows, MacOS and Linux. But I don't think this is particularly useful, as there are many more drawbacks.

Unfortunately none are exactly "perfect". FAT (especially FAT32) is the most conformant between the two, but has some serious issues. E.g. 4GB file size limit, block sizes scaled to several megs making even small files waste lots of space, fragmentation being very prevalent, etc.

ExFAT is slightly better, but still has most of the same issues, and addionaly only later OSXs are able to make use of it.

NTFS is reasonable. Though it requires extra drivers in OSX. It does remove most of the limitations. But has some compatibility issues, especially with access rights and security. Under Linux or pure BSD (the basis of OSX) it tends to work better.

Another alternative might be UDF. But it's not strictly meant for hard drives. Especially on windows it's not perfect.

Unfortunately no wonderful answer. Personally I go with a VM / NAS instead. Something like BSD with a ZFS file system. Which I then use as a server to share files between various systems.

What purpose?

To run macOS on? Definitely! Though you may want to go with APFS instead as that’s the newer file system from Apple with a few extras like integrity checks and healing abilities built in.

To store your files on an external? Probably better than exFAT too. Though again APFS is slightly better than that even.

As a means to copy files to a Windows machine? Simplest way to get that done yes. “Best” not so much, but definitely easiest.

exFAT is really a minimalist file system. Even on Windows it’s used only when it really has to be used. E.g. if you have to transfer files from some miniature device like a digital camera. Else it gets avoided like the plague. It has no safety features, no means to try and keep files from corrupting, no attempt at avoiding fragmentation, no idea or concept of access levels. For those things Windows has NTFS instead.

I’m assuming you’re on an Apple machine, else you’d not have mentioned HFS+. That’s really the only place anyone uses that. If so, and if you do need to work constantly with Windows machines, your best bet would actually be to get a 3rd party NTFS driver - like the one from Paragon. If you don’t need to interchange disks with Windows, there really isn’t any need, NTFS is pretty much similar to HFS+, in some ways HFS+ is actually better than that as well.

The trouble is “Windows”. If you have to work with it, you’re either stuck with a rock or a hard place … or getting a 3rd party driver for that which can then use HFS+ or APFS. If it’s not your own Windows machine, then the 3rd party option isn’t an option.

Actually, if you really want some external drive capable of being used by both macOS and Windows, as well as nearly every possible other thing … look at UFS. It’s the file system originally intended for DVDs, but it’s at least as good as FAT (all forms) and in some ways a bit better.

Or if you need to transfer files, why not simply use a network share? That way you don’t need to bother with file system formats - just use whatever your operating system uses.

Yes, it’s one of the major reasons it exists. A means to get around the 32bit limitation on file sizes of FAT32. exFAT vs. FAT32 Comparison

In theory a file can be up to 16EB (Exa Bytes) … being a million times a Terra Byte, which itself is a million Mega Bytes, being a million Bytes - so 16 of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. There aren’t any disks that large, you’d have to start placing that file across 1000s to millions of them.

In practise though, the limit of the volume (i.e. the entire disk) for an exFAT system is smaller than the maximum file size. That is listed as 128PB (Peta Bytes = 1000 TB = 1,000,000 GB = etc.) Even that is more than any disk in existence right now. To get just 1PB you’d need several disks in combination with one another, something like an entire server full of them.

Just how large a file do you want?

The reason these are so “stupendously” large is due to exponents. Add one extra bit and the available maximum number is doubled. Add another and it’s doubled again. Meaning the original 32bit FAT could only handle up to file sizes of 2^32 (4GB), but with exFAT’s 64bit that is the 32bit limit doubled 32 times over again - i.e. multiplied by 2 for 32 times after each multiplication.

It’s effectively an overkill solution. We may never reach that amount of data, not practically. Though stranger things have happened, so I’m not discounting it in the far future.