Anika Begay
Microsoft is planning to remove the 32GB size limit for FAT32 partitions in Windows 11. While FAT supports volumes up to 2TB, Windows has had an arbitrary 32GB limit in place for nearly 30 years.
“When formatting disks from the command line using the format command, we have increased the FAT32 size limit from 32 GB to 2 TB,” the Windows team revealed in a blog post on Thursday detailing the latest canary test build of Windows 11.
At the moment the limit is only removed from the formatting command line, so the existing formatting dialog will continue to have the FAT32 size limit unless Microsoft finally decides to update this Windows feature that they have forgotten about for decades.
The 32GB limit was originally introduced during the development of Windows 95, more than 30 years ago. Former Windows developer Dave Plummer said earlier this year that he was responsible for the formatting dialog that hasn’t been touched in decades, and he also chose the 32GB limit for FAT32.
“I also had to decide how much ‘cluster slack’ would be excessive, and that ended up limiting the size of a FAT volume format to 32GB,” Plummer admitted in a Post on X“That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.”
Windows has long supported reading FAT32 partitions up to 2TB in size, but until now it hasn’t been possible to create one in the operating system without a third-party tool. Hopefully Microsoft will decide to update the format GUI in future builds of Windows 11, to make it even easier for everyone to create full FAT32 partitions.
