Microsoft is fixing an issue that has been bothering Windows users for a long time — removing the 32GB size limit for FAT32 partitions in Windows 11. Though FAT supports volumes up to 2TB, Windows has had a 32GB limit in place for nearly 30 years.

“When formatting disks from the command line using the format command, we’ve increased the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to 2TB,” said the Windows team in a blog post.

The company is increasing the limits first in a beta version of Windows 11, specifically the Build 27686 preview release for the Canary channel.

The 32GB limit was put in place during the development of Windows 95 around 30 years ago. Former Windows developer Dave Plummer recently said he was responsible for the format dialogue box. But one needs to realise that around 1994, hard drives were, at most, a few hundred megabytes in size while 3.5-inch floppies could store around 1.44MB, so it was difficult to imagine a time when disks would come with 32GB.

Plummer wrote the Format dialogue in late 1994 when his team was porting the user interface from Windows 95 (released in mid-1995) to the more stable Windows NT (NT 4.0, released in mid-1996). Formatting disks "was just one of those areas where Windows NT was different enough from Windows 95 that we had to come up with some custom UI”, wrote Plummer on X, formerly Twitter.

"I got out a piece of paper and wrote down all the options and choices you could make with respect to formatting a disk, like filesystem, label, cluster size, compression, encryption, and so on," he posted.

"Then I busted out [Visual] C++ 2.0 and used the Resource Editor to lay out a simple vertical stack of all the choices you had to make, in the approximate order you had to make. It wasn't elegant, but it would do until the elegant UI arrived. That was some 30 years ago, and the dialogue is still my temporary one from that Thursday morning, so be careful about checking in 'temporary' solutions!"

Plummer said he had to decide how much "cluster slack" would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB.

Windows has long supported reading FAT32 partitions that are up to 2TB in size, but users needed to create it with a third-party tool until now.