Microsoft boosts Windows’ FAT32 partition size limit after 30 years
Microsoft righted an age-old “wrong” (at least for those who geek out on disk formatting) earlier this week. With its latest Windows 11 Insider Canary Preview Build (viaThe Verge), the company increased the maximum FAT32 partition size limit from 32GB to 2TB when using the command line. The boost from the previous limit, which its creator thought would be limited to the lifespan of Windows NT 4.0, comes after 28 years.
FAT32 isn’t widely used today. Even SD cards, the last holdout, have mostly moved to exFAT. (FAT32 has other limitations for the modern world, like a 4GB file size limit.) So, the move appears to be more about making amends — a Windows geek’s equivalent of pardoning a historical figure who’s been dead for a century — than a practical change that will affect people today.
In a 2021 video on his “Dave’s Garage” YouTube channel, retired Microsoft system engineer Dave Plummer explained why he chose the 32GB partition cap. When he picked the limit “on a rainy Tuesday morning” in the mid-90s, he thought it would have an extremely short lifespan and would see an increase in the next revision. “I picked the number 32GB as the limit and went on with my day,” he said. “I didn’t start to regret that choice until SD cards got to the magic 32GB size many years later.”
See more in the article here and Plummer’s video about his FAT32 decision below:
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