Operating systems take care of a lot of low-level system details to help you do your day-to-day work, but it’s always a good idea to understand what’s going on inside your machine. And file system formats are a good example. NTFS is a format you’ve probably encountered on recent versions of Windows, but exFAT is also good to know if you work with other operating systems.

The most important consideration when choosing between these two file systems is the system you are mounting the drive to. For example, you may want to mount removable storage such as USB flash drives to systems running Windows, macOS, Linux, or even Android. In this case, the broader overall support of the exFAT file system will make your cross-platform work a lot easier.

On the other hand, if you’re certain that the drive will be used exclusively in Windows (as your computer’s internal SSD likely would be), then go with NTFS. The built-in security and resilience features that you automatically get make this a no-brainer. This can also include media like external hard drives. Be careful when trying to use them with other systems, though, as not all features (even as basic as write access) may be supported.

Microsoft created the NT file system, or NTFS, for its Windows NT enterprise operating system. It did this to address some of the existing limitations and restrictions of the FAT-based format used in consumer operating systems. These included support for larger file and directory sizes, enhanced security, and resilience features. Windows XP inherited this as its default file system format, and it has been very well integrated into versions of Windows since then.