Microsoft plans 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 has kept it at 32GB for nearly three decades.

In a recent blog post announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27686, Microsoft stated in the release notes: “When formatting disks from the command line using the Format command, we increased the FAT32 size limit from 32 GB to 2 TB.”

This currently only works if you format the drive from the command line and this feature is only available in Windows Insider Preview.

Interestingly, Dave Plummer, a Windows developer who worked on Windows components such as Task Manager, Windows Pinball, the calculator, ZIP folders, and product activation, said that the 32GB limit on FAT volumes was an arbitrary decision he made one morning while working on the Windows Format dialog box.

I believe I wrote this formatting dialog on a rainy Thursday morning at Microsoft in late 1994.

We ported tons of lines of code from the Windows 95 interface to NT, and the format was just one of the areas where Windows NT was so different from Windows 95 that we had to come up with a custom interface.

I took out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices available when formatting a hard drive, such as file system, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on.

Then I pulled out VC++2.0 and used the resource editor to create a simple vertical stack of all the decisions to be made in the approximate order. It wasn’t elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI was available.

That was about 30 years ago now and the dialogue is still my provisional dialogue from that Thursday morning, so be careful when checking in on “temporary” solutions!

I also had to decide how much “cluster slack” was too much, and that resulted in limiting the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB. This limit was also an arbitrary decision that morning, and one that has stayed 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 hard disk drives) and many computer users who work with a range of old and new computers, printers and security camera recorders carry around a FAT32 formatted USB drive. Unlike NTFS, MacOS users can also write data to the FAT file system without third-party applications. The removal of this file limitation means that drives larger than 32GB (up to 2TB) can now be used in the FAT32 file system.