When windows appeared way back we had the file system FAT, then we got FAT32. But it still has a lot of limitations. Mostly the inability to handle single files larger than 4GB. When the USB sticks gets biggen and bigger the more common one to use is exFAT.

exFAT is built on the simplicity of FAT but designed specifically for large volume flash media, the type of which we now find in memory cards for cameras, portable USB drives and so on.exFAT is faster than FAT32 and does a better job of maintaining speed with large volumes of files. In other words, if you’re carrying around and regularly use USB keys or memory cards, you should be probably be using exFAT to make the most of them.

The only problem is that the stock linux installation cant handle it, without some tweaking. Fortunately its an easy thing to enable it.

While the Linux exFAT driver supports reading and writing to exFAT volumes, it’s so new there isn’t currently support for creating exFAT volumes. So, for the moment, you’ll need to start using an exFAT volume by first formatting the device in Windows Vista or Windows 7. Or use a pre formatted drive.

Enabling exFAT

Open up a terminal and do the following commands (in 12.10 the package is already in the repoitories so its just to

The driver uses the FUSE (filesystem in userspace) framework. For it to work, FUSE needs to be enabled in the kernel. If you use the stock Ubuntu kernels then this is the default, so you don’t have to do anything else. If you roll your own drill down to ‘Filesystems > FUSE’ and either compile it in statically or enable it as a ‘M’odule, then compile and install your kernel.

As its now installed, you still have to tell mount to mount a filesystem with it. So the command for mounting it is:

So now you can use exfat on your linux system.