Well, you learn something new every year. Since I am always hauling around large files in excess of 4GB I have been using NTFS on my USB drives forever. The only practical reason was for the large file sizes. I had no need of encryption or compression. When ExFat came out and started to get more popular I simply bypassed it thinking that it provided nothing that NTFS did.
The prior 2 USB 3 drives I bought were having small file performance issues, as well as dismount issues. So, on a lark over the recent holiday days off I setup one as ExFat. I was pleasantly surprised.
I found the same stick that was previously NTFS mounted a lot faster as ExFat. I also typically put a VeraCrypt container on the sticks that is about 3/4 or more of the drive in size and launch it from the stick itself using a script in the root of the drive. The VeraCrypt container mounted a lot faster (it was also formatted as ExFat) and most importantly, dismounted and allowed the stick itself to be unmounted cleanly without a reboot. Prior to this, the last few USB 3 sticks I had refused to be dismounted citing an application had files open. Under ExFat it will now dismount the Veracrypt and then the USB drive just as I want it too.
I just bought a SanDisk256G Extreme PRO oer Steve at Easy2Boots recommendation. It seems amazingly fast. I formatted it as NTFS and I am pondering swapping it over to ExFat as well.
So, it may be old news to some of you guys, but it was a learning experience for me.
Anyone else have similar experiences?