 To provide improvement in the allocation of cluster storage for a new file, Microsoft incorporated a method to pre-allocate contiguous clusters and bypass the use of updating the FAT table and on December 10, 2013 the US patent office granted patent US8606830.One feature of exFAT (used in the exFAT implementation within embedded systems) provides atomic transactions for the multiple steps of updating the file system metadata.The feature, called "Transaction Safe FAT", or TexFAT, was granted a patent by the US patent office under US7613738 on November 3, 2009.

exFAT and the rest of the FAT family of file systems does not use indexes for file names, unlike NTFS which uses B-trees for file searching.