It appears that Vista has support for a new filesystem geared for removable media. It appears that you may be able to use this driver on XP as well. Even more fun, ExFAT supports OEM extensions and transactions. My understanding is that transactional support allows for increased assurance of your filesystem not becoming corrupt without the level of extra writing needed by a journaled filesystem. I could be off base, and maybe TFAT doesn’t add journaling. In addition, TFAT is supposed to help protect against corruption when media is unexpectedly removed from the system without “ejecting” it. The latter was a concern relayed to me about not using NTFS on removable media. As with all things Microsoft, I assume that they will present this as an “open” standard, then fight tooth and nail to prevent anybody else from implementing it without their express permission or receiving of royalties. Nonetheless, it sounds like a good improvement, and if it starts with MS, it helps eliminate the issue of getting drivers for this on Windows. An overview of exFAT is here.
Jan 092008