News Windows 11 preview build sees FAT32 partition size increased to 2TB after 30 years

[Admin]

After nearly 30 years since its introduction in Windows 95, Microsoft will soon lift the partition limit in its FAT32 format, increasing it from 32GB to 2TB by initially introducing it in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27686.

Windows 11 preview build sees FAT32 partition size increased to 2TB after 30 years : Read more

 

[Rabohinf]

Narrator: It wasn't Microsoft's first arbitrary and capricious decision, and it wouldn't be the last.

 

[mitch074]

Narrator: It wasn't Microsoft's first arbitrary and capricious decision, and it wouldn't be the last.

Actually, Dave Plummer implemented it because past 32 Gb, cluster size on FAT32 goes to 16 Kb and more - meaning that even smaller files and each directory would take up at least 16 Kb apiece, because FAT32 can only handle 4 billion clusters
NTFS doesn't have that limitation (typical cluster size is 4 Kb) and can store smaller files (less than 512 bytes) directly as metadata, so it doesn't waste disk space as much. At the time, Microsoft engineers somewhat logically determined that people that needed to store either a lot of very small files or files larger than 4 Gb would use Windows NT, and thus NTFS. With Windows XP, NTFS became the default and FAT32 was only really used with USB devices...

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Well think about it, it wasn't until long after NTFS took over Windows that >32GB portable drives really came to the masses so there was no need to go back and increase it, especially since exFAT was created specifically for large drives.

Heck, more annoying to me is that there's no "format as MBR" option without going through Diskpart, drove me mad that my FAT32 formatted drives couldn't be read by my BIOS, car, and other devices because it's GPT by default.

 

[kanewolf]

I bet this has something to do with the increasingly difficult time of finding small (< 64GB) USB storage devices.

 

[pjmelect]

You can format 64GB Fat 32 drives using a cluster size of 64KB which seems to work without any problems. I wonder how they increased the limit to 2TB, you can’t have more clusters as Windows can’t store in memory the required number of cluster addresses, and the only other way is to increase the cluster size to 2MB which I am not sure will work with most versions of Windows.

 

[bourgeoisdude]

Honestly people really shouldn't be using FAT32 on larger flash drives most of the time due to the 4GB file size limit. The cluster size increase and wide availability and compatibility of exFAT makes this even less appealing. There are use cases for FAT32 certainly, but not over 32GB. I'm curious why suddenly they've added it now.

 

[emike09]

2TB is nice, but what about maximum file size limits? 4GB is my main limitation with FAT32. Especially when you have large install.wim files that reach upwards of 6GB for certain Windows USB boot drive installations on systems that can't boot to NTFS, which is many.

I'm also curious if this will be a feature extended to W10. Unlikely since it's not getting any new feature updates. Tons of W10 machines out there, it'd be nice to have compatibility there. Also curious if MacOS will follow along. l

 

[epobirs]

I recall at the time Microsoft made some statements about reliability coming into doubt past 32GB, along with the other more quantifiable issues like the file size limit. The exact nature of this unreliability was left as an exercise for the reader and not given much mention thereafter. Since it was a few more years before USB 2.0 made external drives commonplace, it didn't get much concern.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

I bet this has something to do with the increasingly difficult time of finding small (< 64GB) USB storage devices.

I bet it has more to do with IoT things needing increasing amounts of storage, things like security cameras and drones that use FAT32 and take 128-1TB SD cards which record in non-proprietary formats that can be read natively by Windows (or any OS).