Any performance penalty for using ex-FAT formatted disk?

Storage & Archiving

Any performance penalty for using ex-FAT formatted disk?

Posted by John Jones on August 12, 2011 at 3:22 pm

Sorry, this is not a RAID question but I thought that this would be the best forum for the post.

Is there any reason not to have my scratch disk be ex-FAT? Are read/writes slower?

I was thinking of setting it up like this because I have applications on windows in bootcamp and on mac osx and both can read and write to ex-fat. It would be very convenient to use the same disk under either OS.

thanks.

Fred Jodry replied 14 years, 8 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Alex Gerulaitis
August 12, 2011 at 8:12 pm

I’ve never tried it, will be curious to see how it works for you.

Theoretically exFAT should be faster than either NTFS or HFS+ because of lower overhead – but in practice, the difference should be negligible and really, really depends on (1) the implementation (how well it’s programmed) and (2) usage scenario. I.e. if you plan to use exFAT on fast SSDs and need really fast access to it (over 200MB/s), there could be significant difference based on implementation and OS overhead. For transfer speeds under 100MB/s, the difference is likely negligible.

(On a side note, I don’t see how exFAT addresses fragmentation issues inherent in FAT32.)

Alex (DV411)
Fred Jodry
August 25, 2011 at 4:31 pm

If exFAT retains the advantages of FAT32 then it is a winner. The Windows XP version of NTFS is an example of storage that really stinks. The difference in speed in typical situations is around 20% and in video production might be far worse than that. Even if you use an SSD hard drive instead of a regular one you`ll see some difference, and when you want to back up to tape, Oh brother!
HFS+ might be not too bad but I don`t have the research.
Fred Jodry
August 25, 2011 at 4:32 pm

If exFAT retains the advantages of FAT32 then it is a winner. The Windows XP version of NTFS is an example of storage that really stinks. The difference in speed in typical situations is around 20% and in video production might be far worse than that. Even if you use an SSD hard drive instead of a regular one you`ll see some difference, and when you want to back up to tape, Oh brother!
HFS+ might be not too bad but I don`t have the research.

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