Microsoft plans to remove the 32GB size limit for FAT32 partitions in Windows 11. While FAT supports volumes up to 2TB, Windows has had an arbitrary 32GB limit for nearly 30 years.

“When formatting hard drives from the command line using the format command, we increased the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to 2TB,” the Windows team revealed Thursday in a blog post describing the latest test build of Windows 11 Canary.

The limitation is currently only being removed from the formatting command line, so the existing formatting dialog will continue to show the FAT32 size limit unless Microsoft finally decides to update this decades-forgotten Windows feature.

The 32GB limit was originally introduced over 30 years ago during the development of Windows 95. Former Windows developer Dave Plummer revealed earlier this year that he was responsible for the formatting dialog, which hasn’t been changed in decades, and that he also chose the 32GB limit for FAT32.

“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 32 GB,” Plummer said in a Post on X“This limitation was also an arbitrary decision that morning, which has remained with us as a permanent side effect.”

Windows has long supported reading FAT32 partitions up to 2 TB in size, but until now it was not possible to create one in the operating system without a third-party tool. Hopefully Microsoft decides to update the formatting GUI in the upcoming Windows 11 builds to make it even easier for everyone to create full FAT32 partitions.