I just got a new Surface 3 and want to add a SDHC Sandisk 128GB Extreme Plus. It is pre-formated exFAT. Is this proper for this machine? Should it be formatted NTFS? As the Surface 3 has 64gb I want to move all my folders, pictures, video, appdata/roaming over to it as well as installing software when it can be.
Windows 10 supports exFAT natively and more storage devices seem to be formatted as such. Maybe someone else will have some downside to using it, but if it seems to work in the devices you use it in just keep it.
Hopefully, the Windows update can use that formatting configuration for extra storage devices..but I do not know one way or the other.
I use a 64gb SDHC card for the same thing on my S3 but I have it Formatted Fat32 for PC compatibility , ( Used SD Formatter or the old HP USB Disk Formatter Util I think ) though these days it is unlikely I will need to view or change files on it other than in Win10 so perhaps NTFS isn't an issue anymore ?
Fat32 is limited to 4GB single Files whereas exFat is not , so it may depend on what else you may put on the SDcard too or what you may want to put it into ....AFAIK OSX and up is okay with exFat , but if you use Linux dig a bit deeper to make sure it is supported fully.
One reason to use NTFS maybe if you intend to encrypt the Card or Device for security reasons.
BTW exFAT is a Microsoft standard , bit more info here too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT
Having read that wiki, I'm going to leave it exFat. Thank you for that link!
Also read quite a few posts on other forums about issues with several other brands that just lost the card and Sandisk seemed to have been the one that didn't display this issue. I bought it because I like WD's products and they own Sandisk.
Thanks much!
Quote