Wednesday, August 21st 2024
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Microsoft Updates the 30-year-old FAT32 File-system with 2TB Volume Size Limits
With the latest Insider update to Windows 11, Microsoft refreshed its 30-year-old FAT32 file-system with support for a maximum volume size of 2 TB. The file-system was limited to 32 GB until now. This update, however, does not change the maximum file-size limit of 4 GB. The move is probably aimed at making life easy for enterprises using the file-system for whatever reason, or for high capacity removable media to have better cross-platform support (eg: to video equipment). If you mainly move files within a Windows ecosystem, it's highly recommended that you stick to NTFS as it offers security features and support for larger files, which FAT32 doesn't.
Source:
Notebook Check
49 Comments on Microsoft Updates the 30-year-old FAT32 File-system with 2TB Volume Size Limits
1) As far as I understand from vague descriptions - it's only for format command, so you won't be able to do it in GUI as you'd suspect (not in diskmgmt.msc, and not in format dialogue)
2) Not sure if it applies to diskpart either, which is a total bummer
3) it's only making its way in testing build, so knowing MS there is no guarantee that it'll roll out to consumers
I managed to create usb sticks with vfat, which should be fat32 afaik, with 8 and 16GB in gnu gentoo linux several times.
www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/mkfs.vfat.8.html
Assuming that information is correct: What is the current size limitation of mkfs.vfat?
stackoverflow.com/questions/40012887/what-is-the-maximum-volume-size-of-vfat
2TB for 512 byte sector size and 16TB for a 4K sector size.
I think microsoft is very late in implementing that feature.
As far as I have understood, or which I assume, vfat should be fat32.
MSI B550 Gaming EDGE WIFI -> same
Car Radio for playing mp3 files from USB stick. Windows could not / can not format fat32 for 8 and 16GB USB sticks for years.
NTFS / vfat are both antique and mediocre file systems.
Anyway regardless of niche use case for which I’m convinced is all there is now your cluster slack is going to be atrocious. Fat32 can’t die soon enough.
I've updated my X570 TUF a few times but I just grab a 1GB USB stick and dump ROM to the FAT16 partition.
It makes security sense that it wouldn't understand NTFS or any modern FS.
If I need to use a bigger USB flash I'm probably making one big NTFS/ReFS and consistently booting from that. That's so weird. Is this an issue for the antique XPe carputers? Ain't no waaaay. That's insane. What kind of firmware has that much freedom?
USB and SD cards all generally come formatted to FAT32 or ExFAT. It's still a perfectly valid, and exceedingly common, way to carry files on removable drives. It's silly to go around dissing it just because its old. As others have pointed out NTFS is just as old. ExFAT has now been open sourced, so that might be out of date to say it requires licensing still.
ExFAT is just as its name suggests, an extension to FAT32.
@DaemonForce I also used that assistant on windows 11 pro for creating larger fat32 partitions. But when I read it out with the userspace tool with the linux kernel I get as a result, EXFAT was created and not fat32. Fat32 was selected in that dialog in windows while creating the file system. the feature was / is broken.
That microsoft assistant is basically false. Do it - read out the partition with a valid tool - e.g. gparted livecd or using gparted with sysrescue-cd. I assume the casual user is able o use a livelinux iso but do not have gnu linux with userspace installed. That's exactly what I do with vfat on a 128MB Lexar USB drive. vfat should be different as fat32. => mkfs.vfat is what i always use for ages, most likely since 2006 or earlier. I hardly format any stuff in windows.
It is always a good idea to resize and check Microsoft Windows generated file systems and partitions. Too big partitions means resizing. Wrong alingment and other stuff, change it.
The windows installer works the best when you give windows only a certain junk of the data drive without a partition and file system.
Ok just found this on the wikipedia page for exfAT. That explains things.
answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/deleting-4gb-file-on-fat32-disk-leaves-orphan/78fa76f6-c73f-48b1-9529-ecbb6295d09b
x.com/davepl1968/status/1772042158046146792
But still lightyears ahead of FAT disk. It matters as newer drives aren't getting smaller, and if we reach a limit in the future a lot of non-power users won't be able to create an update tool.
You can manually change a partition size and bypass the limit but would Windows let a batch file like that run since it could also destroy volumes if pointed at the wrong drive?