eXFAT the new FAT32?

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Hello there,

I have an important question and I hope you'll be able to help me out.
I just bought a new external Samsung hard drive for work, that I also need to use at home. We run Windows 7 and XP at the office, but I'm working on Snow Leopard at home, will probably upgrade to Lion.

I used to format my external hard drives to FAT32, and have never encountered compatibility issue with Windows/Mac. But the new hard drive won't let me format to FAT32, so I used ExFat. I'm now able to read and write at home on my iMac - but will that format work for Windows?

I appreciate the help,
Sandra
 
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ExFAT is just a fancy name that stands for "Extended File Allocation Table" - sounds complicated, but the upshot of that is it's basically just FAT64.

As the FAT formats are developed by Microsoft Windows 7 supports ExFAT out the box, and XP will support it, so long as you've installed all the service packs & other updates (and both XP and 7 will support it even if they're only 32 bit versions of Windows).
 

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