File System Functionality Comparison

The following tables list functionality and feature support comparisons for the four main Windows file systems, NTFS, exFAT, UDF, and FAT32:

Functionality

Feature	NTFS	exFAT	UDF	FAT32
Creation time stamps	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Last access time stamps	No (see note below)	Yes	Yes	Yes (date only)
Last change time stamps	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Last archive time stamps	No	No	No	No
Case-sensitive	Yes (option)	No	Yes	No
Case-preserving	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Hard links	Yes	No	Yes	No
Soft links	Yes	No	No	No
Sparse files	Yes	No	Yes	No
Named streams	Yes	No	Yes	No
Oplocks	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Extended attributes	Yes	No	Yes (on-disk only)	No
Alternate data streams	Yes	No	Yes	No
Mount points	Yes	No	No	No

Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP: The NTFS last access time stamp field is updated.

Feature	NTFS	exFAT	UDF	FAT32
Maximum file name length	255 Unicode characters	255 Unicode characters	127 Unicode or 254 ASCII characters	255 Unicode characters
Maximum path name length	32,760 Unicode characters with each path component no more than 255 characters	32,760 Unicode characters with each path component no more than 255 characters	32,760 Unicode characters with each path component no more than 255 characters	32,760 Unicode characters with each path component no more than 255 characters
Maximum file size	2^64–1 bytes	2^64–1 bytes	2^64–1 bytes	4 GiB
Maximum volume size	16 TB (4 KB Cluster Size) or 256TB (64 KB Cluster Size)	2^32–1 clusters (Maximum cluster size = 2^25–1)	2^32 blocks	2^32 blocks

Feature	NTFS	exFAT	UDF	FAT32
Metadata-only journaling	Yes	No	No	No
File change log	Yes	No	No	No

Feature	NTFS	exFAT	UDF	FAT32
Tail packing	Yes (small files are made resident in the MFT stream descriptor)	No	No	No
Extents	Yes	No	Yes	No
Variable block size	No (set by the volume)	No	No	No

Feature	NTFS	exFAT	UDF	FAT32
Track file owner	Yes	No	No	No
POSIX file permissions	No (available in POSIX subsystem feature)	No	Yes	No
Access control lists	Yes	No	No	No
File system level encryption	Yes	No	No	No
Checksum/ECC	No	Metadata	Metadata	No

Feature	NTFS	exFAT	UDF	FAT32
Built-in compression	Yes	No	No	No

Feature	NTFS	exFAT	UDF	FAT32
User-level disk space	Yes	No	No	No
Directory-level disk space	No (see note below)	No	No	No

Note The directory-level disk space quotas feature on NTFS is available through the File Server Resource Manager.

Feature	NTFS	exFAT	UDF	FAT32
File level	No (see note below)	No	No	No

Note Single-instance store for NTFS is available as part of the Single Instance Storage feature in Windows Server.