Microsoft is finally removing this 30-year-old limitation of Windows, here’s how it affects you

Windows 11

Microsoft has finally updated the FAT32 partition system of Windows 11 to remove a major limitation that Windows operating systems have had for nearly 30 years. The company has confirmed that it has removed the 32GB arbitrary limitation of FAT32 and users can now increase the format partition limit to 2TB.

In a blog post explaining the latest Windows 11 Canary test build, the company mentioned, “When formatting disks from the command line using the format command, we’ve increased the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to 2TB,”

Windows 11 finally supports 2TB FAT32 partitions

With this change, Windows 11 finally gets support for up to 2TB partition size for drive and even external drives. However, the blog post clearly highlights that the limit has been lifted in the latest Canary build of Windows 11 and it works when formatting a partition or drive using the command prompt.

The 32GB limitation is still there when formatting using the graphical user interface – Right click > Format method.

If you are unaware, the 32GB FAT32 limitation started with Windows 95 during its development, and it remained unchanged until now.

What it means for users

Well, FAT32 is sort of an outdated partition format, and most people don’t use it considering NTFS and exFAT are far more advanced partition formats with the latter being compatible with both Windows and macOS.

However, some devices only support the FAT32 partition format. Apart from these, the updated 2TB limitation enables it to be more useful than before and users can now format their external drives as well as internal partition to FAT32 without the 32GB limitation.