Perhaps because Windows has built-in exFAT support?
It's a good idea to format cards in-camera, or to use the SD Association's special format utility (if you must do the formatting on a computer), but according to the SanDisk page, Windows 7 supports exFAT natively. Windows 7 should recognize exFAT-formatted cards. Some Windows implementations of FAT32 limit partition size to 32 GB. Windows and macOS can read and write FAT32 (the standard filesystem for SDHC cards) and exFAT (the standard filesystem for SDXC ones) without assistance. It's not clear that NTFS and APFS have ever been fully documented. Windows cannot read HFS, HFS+, or APFS volumes without third-party drivers. MacOS can read NTFS volumes, but cannot write to them without the help of third-party drivers. If the card reader does not support SDXC then Windows will be unable to format a large card to ExFat and not be able to read a large card formatted according to the SD specification to ExFat. Now the problem is that SDHC and SDXC requires a card reader that supports the type of card. SD cards are limited to 2GB, SDHC cards can store up to 32GB, meaning both can be formatted to FAT32 under Windows. SDXC cards can hold up to 2TB and will be formatted to ExFat under Windows. The maximum storage size for a FAT32 volume that can be formatted under Windows is 32GB, ExFat is used for "large" memory cards. Was there just some other problem(s) with the disk? I didn't think to check Wikipedia, duh!īut I do wonder why I found a number of posts saying people couldn't read exFAT disks in Win7, and even some having problems in Win10. Is there 3rd-party sw that will enable Win7 to read the disk?Īll this probably shows I'm confused about Mac file formats.ĮxFAT support goes back to Windows XP (with updates installed) and everything since then, so you should be fine. I thought it best to ask for advice before trying.Ģ. Can Win10 natively read an exFAT formatted disk? (I don't need to write to it, just transfer the data to my Windows hd.) The programs that say they can read Mac file system disks in Windows speak only about APFS and HFS formatted ones - no mention of exFAT on the ones I found.ġ. There are a number of programs that say they can format a disk as exFAT in Windows, but they are silent about _reading_ an exFAT disk. It seems clear that Win7 can't natively do this. Somewhat ambiguous info seems to say that Win10 can do this, but its not clear to me whether its talking about APFS and/or HFS rather than exFAT.Ī number of posts on other places say they have run into problems trying to do this in Win 10, being prompted to format the disk - which of course I don't want to do.
I need to read an exFAT formatted microSD disk in Windows 10 and possibly in Win7 (both Pro version).