getting fat–

The Windows NT-era disk format UI hasn’t been repaired.

Andrew Cunningham
– Aug 16, 2024 5:41 pm UTC

As we wait on this fall’s Windows 11 24H2 upgrade to be launched to the public, work continues other brand-new functions that might be part of other future Windows updates. A brand-new Canary channel Windows Insider construct launched the other day repairs a decades-old and approximate constraint that limited brand-new FAT32 partitions to 32GB in size, although the filesystem itself has an optimum supported size of 2TB (and Windows can check out and acknowledge 2TB FAT32 partitions without a problem).

In the meantime, this limitation is just being raised for the command-line format tools in Windows. The disk format UI, which looks basically the exact same now as it did when it was presented in Windows NT 4.0 nearly 30 years back, still has the approximate 32GB capability constraint.

The 32GB limitation can presumably be pinned on previous Microsoft developer Dave Plummer, who periodically shares stories about his time dealing with Windows in the 1990s and early 2000s. Plummer states that he composed the file format dialog, meaning it as a “short-term” service, and arbitrarily picked 32GB as a size limitation for disks, likely since it appeared huge enough at the time (Windows NT 4.0 needed a tremendous 110MB of disk area).

There aren’t a lots of factors to really utilize a FAT32 disk in 2024, and it’s been changed by other filesystems for practically whatever. As a filesystem for your primary OS drive, it was changed by NTFS years ago; as a commonly suitable filesystem for external drives that can be checked out from and composed to by numerous running systems, you ‘d most likely wish to utilize exFAT rather. FAT32 still has a 4GB limitation on the size of specific files.

If you’re formatting a disk to utilize with an old variation of Windows, or with some older gadget that can just work with FAT32 disks, this tweak might make Windows a small bit more beneficial for you.

Noting image by Alpha Six