Microsoft is planning to remove the 32GB file size limit for FAT32 volumes in Windows 11. The FAT specification can actually support volumes up to 2TB, but Microsoft Windows kept it at 32GB for nearly three decades.
In a recent blog post, announcing the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27686, Microsoft said in its release notes: “When formatting disks from the command line using the format command, we’ve increased the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to 2TB.”
For now, this only works if you format the drive using the command line to perform the format, and this function is only available in the Windows Insider preview build.
Interestingly, Dave Plummer, a Windows Developer who worked on Windows components such as Task Manager, Windows Pinball, Calculator, ZIP folders, and product activation, said that the 32GB limit for FAT volumes was an arbitrary choice made one morning while he was working on the Windows Format dialog box.
I wrote this Format dialog back on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994, I think it was.
We were porting the bajillion lines of code from the Windows95 user interface over to NT, and Format was just one of those areas where WindowsNT was different enough from Windows95 that we had to come up with some custom UI.
I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.
Then I busted out VC++2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived.
That was some 30 years ago, and the dialog is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in “temporary” solutions!
I also had to decide how much “cluster slack” would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning, and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.
-Dave Plummer
So why is it relevant now that we use better file systems like NTFS? Well, FAT32 is still used on old drives (USB and disc drives), and many computer users who work across a number of old and new computers, printers, and security camera recorders carry a FAT32-formatted USB drive around. Unlike NTFS, MacOS users can also write data to the FAT file system without 3rd party applications. The removal of this file limit means that drives bigger than 32GB (up to 2TB) can now be used on the FAT32 file system.