New Windows 11 release removes old arbitrary 32GB size limit for FAT32 drives

While we wait for this fall’s Windows 11 24H2 update to be released to the general public, work continues on other new features that could be part of other future Windows updates. New Canary Channel Windows Insider Build He was released yesterday. Fixes a decades-old arbitrary restriction that limited new FAT32 partitions to 32GB in size, even though the file system itself has a maximum supported size of 2TB (and Windows can read and recognize 2TB FAT32 partitions without a problem).

Currently, this limit is only lifted for Windows command-line formatting tools. The disk formatting user interface, which now looks almost exactly the same as it did when it was introduced in Windows NT 4.0 nearly 30 years ago, still has an arbitrary 32GB limit.

The 32GB limit is said to be due to former Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer, who occasionally tells stories about his time working on Windows in the 1990s and early 2000s. Plummer says he wrote the file format dialog, intended it as a “temporary” solution, and arbitrarily chose 32GB as the maximum disk size, perhaps because it seemed large enough at the time (Windows NT 4.0 required 110MB of disk space).

There aren’t many reasons to use a FAT32 drive in 2024, and it has been replaced by other file systems for just about everything. As the file system for your main operating system drive, it was replaced by NTFS decades ago; as a widely compatible file system for external drives that can be read from and written to by many operating systems, you may want to use exFAT instead. FAT32 still has a 4GB limit on individual file sizes.

But if you’re formatting a drive for use with an older version of Windows, or with some older hardware that can only work with FAT32 drives, this tweak might make Windows more useful for you.

List image by Alpha six