At the dawn of the computer industry, it was hard to imagine the extent to which data storage volumes would grow, so some inherited limitations have persisted since long ago. In the new build of Windows 11, Microsoft has lifted the classic limitation on the capacity of hard drives formatted as FAT32: the limit has increased from 32 GB to 2 TB.
As noted by Bloomberg, this feature was introduced in the preview 26300.8170 (KB5083632) of Windows 11, which is available through the Windows Insider channels. Now, you can format a hard drive or any other storage device as FAT32, specifying a maximum capacity not of 32 GB, as was previously the case, but any value up to and including 2 TB. However, to do this, you will need to run the procedure through the command line, as the graphical interface of the corresponding utility retains the previous limitations in this area.
The reforms in this area were first announced by Microsoft back in 2024, but only recently have they begun to be implemented for selected users in the Windows Insider channels. According to Microsoft representatives, the 32 GB limit for FAT32 was established at the formatting utility level in the Windows 9x family of operating systems, while the FAT32 specifications themselves did not impose such a limitation.
Microsoft introduced support for the FAT32 file system in 1996 with the release of Windows 95 OSR2 (MS-DOS 7.1). Before this, users had to rely on the FAT file system, which was introduced in 1977. FAT32 uses a 32-bit field in its boot sector to count sectors on the disk volume, so with 512-byte sectors, the maximum supported storage capacity reaches 2 TB. To raise it to 16 TB, one must switch to 4096-byte sectors. For a long time, to use hard disk partitions larger than 32 GB with the FAT32 file system, consumers had to rely on third-party utilities for formatting. The more advanced NTFS file system is not always the optimal choice for working with other platforms, which is why FAT32 remains in demand in the modern world. In addition to lifting formatting limitations for FAT32 drives, the new version of Windows 11 also brings several other improvements, including enhanced performance with large data volumes, improved display of network statistics, and changes to the Secure Boot status check function, among others.
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Source: 3dnews.ru
