exFAT File System Driver for Windows XP

The exFAT file system drivers for Windows XP operating system Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Service Pack 3 (SP3) was available for download since late last month from Microsoft’s website. The successor to the FAT32 file system, the exFAT file system has many advantages but also some disadvantages compared with FAT32 and NTFS. The exFAT file system has been developed to meet the growing needs of personal mobile storage that cab be used in various operating systems. The exFAT file was originally published in Windows CE 6.0 and is included in the release of Service Pack 1 of Windows Vista.

One of the main advantages of the exFAT file system compared to the FAT32 system is the support for hard drives that has larger capacities, since both systems has a recommended size of 512TB. The 4 GB file size limit is also eliminated in the exFAT file system. An option to format any removable media with the exFAT file system is made possible by the exFAT file system driver. Also the exFAT file system uses a smaller disk space overhead compared to the NTFS file system. As reported, the exFAT only uses around 96KB of space overhead in a 4GB flash drive as compared to the NTFS file system which uses more than 47MB of space.

For a user to download and make the update using the exFAT file system driver, Windows XP SP2 or SP3 operating system needs to be installed.

Source: gHacks