Enlarge / Many users recognize this familiar dialog box from Windows formatting. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
As we anticipate the upcoming release of the Windows 11 24H2 update this fall, developers are simultaneously working on various enhancements that could feature in future updates for Windows. A recent build for the Canary channel in the Windows Insider program, which was made available yesterday, addresses a longstanding limitation that has historically confined new FAT32 partitions to a maximum size of just 32GB—despite the filesystem actually being able to support partitions as large as 2TB (and recognizing them without any complications within Windows).
At present, this change only affects command-line tools used for disk formatting in Windows; the graphical user interface for disk management continues to enforce the outdated limit of 32GB, appearing largely unchanged since its inception during the era of Windows NT 4.0 nearly three decades ago.
The source of this restrictive limit can reportedly be traced back to a former Microsoft developer named Dave Plummer. He often recounts anecdotes from his tenure at Microsoft during the late ’90s and early ’00s and mentions that when he created the file format dialog, he designated a mere “temporary” cap of 32GB for disks—a choice likely influenced by it being considered sufficiently large at that time when installing an operating system like Windows NT 4.0 typically required around only 110MB of disk space.
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