Short: It’s taken nearly three decades, but Microsoft is finally increasing the FAT32 size limit. The long-overdue change isn’t widely rolled out yet—it’s only available to Windows 11 Insiders running the latest Canary build—but as the saying goes, better late than never, right?
FAT, short for File Allocation Table, is a file system originally designed for floppy disks. FAT eventually found its way to hard disks and other storage media and was the default file system for several Microsoft operating systems until Windows XP switched to NTFS in 2001.
According to former Windows developer Dave W. Plummer, who developed the well-known Format dialog box in late 1994, it was meant to be a simple placeholder that would suffice until a more elegant interface was available. Well, that never happened, and Plummer’s temporary solution became permanent.
In an X-post on the subject, Plummer said he was also responsible for figuring out “how much ‘cluster stack’ would be too much,” which ultimately limited the format size to 32GB.
Now, some 30 years later, Microsoft is finally getting around to addressing the size limit. The latest Canary version of Windows 11 (build 27686) increases the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to a much more modern 2TB. Note that this only applies to formatting disks from the command line using the “format” command. With any luck, Microsoft will eventually update the GUI path as well.
Windows has supported reading FAT32 partitions up to 2 TB in size for some time, but creating them required a third-party tool. Also note that files stored on a FAT32-formatted drive have a size limit of 4 GB each.
FAT32 is not as popular as it once was, having been replaced by more modern file systems like NTFS and exFAT. However, many USB drives and SD cards still use the format, and it’s time for Microsoft to increase the size limit.
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