Microsoft boosts Home windows’ FAT32 partition dimension restrict after almost three a long time

Microsoft righted an age-old “fallacious” (at the very least for many who geek out on disk formatting) earlier this week. With its latest Home windows 11 Insider Canary Preview Construct (via The Verge), the corporate elevated the utmost FAT32 partition dimension restrict from 32GB to 2TB when utilizing the command line. The increase from the earlier restrict, which its creator thought could be restricted to the lifespan of Home windows NT 4.0, comes after 28 years.

FAT32 isn’t broadly used right this moment. Even SD cards, the final holdout, have principally moved to exFAT. (FAT32 has different limitations for the trendy world, like a 4GB file dimension restrict.) So, the transfer seems to be extra about making amends — a Home windows geek’s equal of pardoning a historic determine who’s been useless for a century — than a sensible change that can have an effect on folks right this moment. The truth that the Home windows GUI partitioning software nonetheless contains the 32GB partition cap additional decreases the chances that many will discover a lot tangible profit from the transfer.

In a 2021 video on his “Dave’s Storage” YouTube channel, retired Microsoft system engineer Dave Plummer defined why he selected the 32GB partition cap. When he picked the restrict “on a wet Tuesday morning” within the mid-90s, he thought it might have an especially quick lifespan and would see a rise within the subsequent revision. “I picked the quantity 32GB because the restrict and went on with my day,” he mentioned. “I didn’t begin to remorse that selection till SD playing cards received to the magic 32GB dimension a few years later.”

Plummer went on to dispute the parable that Microsoft imposed the 32GB cap to push the adoption of the corporate’s NTFS format. He defined that NTFS was already broadly adopted and that, to his information, Microsoft by no means promoted it or made a dime from licensing it. As an alternative, he says FAT32’s synthetic cap was extra about stopping wasted house (particularly with small recordsdata) than deploying any sinister company methods.

In the event you actually wish to nerd out on ‘90s disk codecs, Plummer’s three-year-old video goes into extra element about his arbitrary choice that — unbeknownst to him on the time — would final almost 30 years.