I’ve decided that I’m going to be reformatting my 25 TB of external storage capacity (for storing datasets, backups, etc.) to exFAT. Most of it is currently ext4 or NTFS.
exFAT is great because similar to its predecessor FAT it has read-write compatibility with Linux, Windows, and macOS. But while FAT can only have files as big as 4 GB and partitions of 16 TB, exFAT can do 16 EB for files and 64 ZB for partitions. Lots more room to grow.
It’ll be a slow process since I can only format one drive at a time and need to copy the data to another drive and back again. So far I’ve converted 4 TB of data.
Kyle Piira 
3 replies on “Switching to exFAT”
@kyle you're going to have to defrag that thing periodically. ext(2,3,4) doesn't have a fragmentation problem.
I just coverted my 2TB external storage from NTFS to ext4 with LUKS. What are the benefits of exFAT over ext4?
Mainly that is has native support in macOS, Windows, and Linux. I think ext4 is a better filesystem if you are only going to use it with Linux systems, however neither macOS nor Windows support it out of the box.