Microsoft righted an age-old “improper” (at the very least for individuals who geek out on disk formatting) earlier this week. With its newest Home windows 11 Insider Canary Preview Construct (by way of The Verge), the corporate elevated the utmost FAT32 partition dimension restrict from 32GB to 2TB when utilizing the command line. The increase from the earlier restrict, which its creator thought can be restricted to the lifespan of Home windows NT 4.0, comes after 28 years.
FAT32 isn’t broadly used at the moment. Even SD playing cards, the final holdout, have principally moved to exFAT. (FAT32 has different limitations for the fashionable world, like a 4GB file dimension restrict.) So, the transfer seems to be extra about making amends — a Home windows geek’s equal of pardoning a historic determine who’s been lifeless for a century — than a sensible change that can have an effect on individuals at the moment. The truth that the Home windows GUI partitioning device nonetheless consists of the 32GB partition cap additional decreases the percentages that many will discover a lot tangible profit from the transfer.
In a 2021 video on his “Dave’s Storage” YouTube channel, retired Microsoft system engineer Dave Plummer defined why he selected the 32GB partition cap. When he picked the restrict “on a wet Tuesday morning” within the mid-90s, he thought it will have a particularly brief lifespan and would see a rise within the subsequent revision. “I picked the quantity 32GB because the restrict and went on with my day,” he mentioned. “I didn’t begin to remorse that selection till SD playing cards bought to the magic 32GB dimension a few years later.”
Plummer went on to dispute the parable that Microsoft imposed the 32GB cap to push the adoption of the corporate’s NTFS format. He defined that NTFS was already broadly adopted and that, to his information, Microsoft by no means promoted it or made a dime from licensing it. As a substitute, he says FAT32’s synthetic cap was extra about stopping wasted house (particularly with small recordsdata) than deploying any sinister company methods.
When you actually need to nerd out on ‘90s disk codecs, Plummer’s three-year-old video goes into extra element about his arbitrary resolution that — unbeknownst to him on the time — would final practically 30 years.
