Formatting an external hard drive to exFAT?

Question

I have a 1T Western Digital external hard drive. I'm using it mainly to store movies. When I try to format to NTFS, I get an error message that says 'Windows was unable to complete format'. However, it will format to exFAT without any problems. Is there a any real reason why I should not just go with the exFAT system?

ETA: I'm running Vista.

Answer 1

exFAT does require at the very least an up to date version of Windows XP, so it's slightly less interoperable than NTFS. Also, if you're going to use with a Mac, that will require Snow Leopard and Linux has yet to have usable support.

For a good list of advantages and disadvantages, check the Wikipedia article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExFAT