Yesterday, Microsoft despatched out a brand new preview model of Home windows 11 to Home windows Insiders, and it holds an fascinating change: the max measurement restrict on FAT32 partitions is being bumped as much as 2TB.

FAT32 is a sort of file system used to retailer and handle information on drives. First developed as FAT (File Allocation Desk) in 1977 for floppy disks, it was ultimately prolonged to FAT12, then FAT16, then FAT32 by Microsoft in 1996 to assist more and more bigger drive capacities. Which means FAT32 has been round for nearly 30 years.

For all that point, Microsoft has imposed an arbitrary capability restrict of 32GB on FAT32 drives, regardless that FAT32 can technically assist a max measurement of 16TB. In actual fact, Home windows is ready to learn bigger FAT32 drives in the event that they’ve been partitioned elsewhere, however Home windows itself can’t format drives in FAT32 to sizes higher than 32GB. As a result of Microsoft.

With this Home windows replace — at present solely accessible to Insiders on the Canary channel — the working system is now in a position to format FAT32 drives as much as a max capability of 2TB. As of proper now, that is solely doable utilizing the format command within the command line; for those who use the drive formatting dialog field, the restrict is seemingly unchanged.

Notice that whereas the max capability for FAT32 drives is being elevated to 2TB, the max measurement for any particular person file on FAT32 remains to be 4GB.

Associated: Right here’s a free solution to pace up your USB drives

Why was there a 32GB restrict within the first place? Effectively, Microsoft developed their very own file system known as NTFS in 1993, and this one turned the default file system in Home windows OSes beginning with Home windows XP. So, regardless that Microsoft helped create FAT32 three years later, the limitation is sensible from a push-users-to-NTFS standpoint.

Lately, the overwhelming majority of Home windows customers are utilizing NTFS and there’s actually no want to make use of FAT32 aside from on flash drives and SD playing cards which are probably for use with older gadgets.

Nonetheless, it’s good to know you could create modern-sized FAT32 drives now in Home windows with out having to depend on third-party software program.

Additional studying: FAT32 vs. exFAT vs. NTFS, defined