A limitation that will only be lifted by those accustomed to the command line.
Although we don't really know why now, Microsoft has decided to reverse one of the strangest limitations the American company has ever imposed in its long history: the 32 GB maximum size limit for a FAT32 partition. This purely software-based limitation was introduced at the time of Windows 2000 - based on the NT engine, unlike previous consumer versions of Windows (95, 96, Me) - and has lasted for over twenty years.
This is the output formatting a volume as FAT32 in 27686 pic.twitter.com/LcOsEZqMf3
- Xeno (@XenoPanther) August 15, 2024
At the time, we can assume that Microsoft wanted to encourage users to convert to the NTFS file format, considered more robust by the publisher. In fact, Microsoft had decided to limit the size of FAT32 partitions to 32 GB when, technically, the limit is 2 TB. It was Dave Plummer, a former Microsoft engineer, who arbitrarily chose this 32 GB limit, which today seems very restrictive, given that even the most common USB flash drives are often 16, 32 or even 64 GB in size, and can therefore no longer necessarily be formatted in FAT32 under Windows without losing a large portion of their capacity.
Microsoft has therefore decided to reverse this limitation, as Neowin explains, quoting directly from the official Windows blog. The 32 GB limit will soon be lifted, and it will then be possible to create 2 TB FAT32 partitions. However, as nothing is ever simple with Microsoft, this will only be possible via the command line: " When formatting disks from the command line using the format command, we've increased the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to 2TB ". In short, if you use the Windows GUI to format your USB flash drives, you still won't be able to exceed the 32GB limit... that is, until Microsoft changes its mind.
