Why the Windows system only supports 32GB FAT32 partitions?

Microsoft founder Bill Gates once said that 640 KB is enough and is often used to ridicule, and the 32GB of the FAT32 file system upper limit is also ridiculed.

The FAT32 file system is still in use today, but the upper limit of the file system certainly continues to exist, but now more users use the NTFS system.

Dave Plummer, a retired former Microsoft engineer, recently released a video to explain this restriction, and this restriction comes from Dave Plummer’s hand.

Simply put, Dave Plummer’s setting is to consider the storage media capacity at the time. After all, most of the large-capacity memory cards on the market back then were only 16MB.

The 32GB limit set by Dave Plummer was not set randomly, but the result of comprehensive consideration, avoiding wasted space while increasing capacity as much as possible.

Because the default cluster is too large, it will waste space. For example, when it is set to 32KB, even a few bytes of content will occupy a complete 32KB space.

At present, 32KB is actually very small, and users will not care about it, but the 32KB space in the era of 16MB memory cards was also quite precious and could not be wasted.

Therefore, how to set a threshold that will not cause trouble to users and reduce waste is a question worth considering. This question is handled by Dave Plummer.

After considering the trade-offs, the final limit set is 32GB, so until the limit of the FAT32 partition is still 32GB, Microsoft has not adjusted it for 25 years.

Of course, this setting is only a preset value. In fact, users can also modify the threshold through third-party software, and this limit can also be broken after modification.

There is a reason why Microsoft has not adjusted the threshold for so many years, mainly because it is no longer necessary to modify it as an outdated technical standard.

The currently widely used NTFS file system has replaced the FAT32 file system, so it does not make much practical sense whether to modify it.

In the future, Microsoft may not modify these old standards, until the times and technology develop, these old technical standards slowly withdraw from the stage of history.

Via: theregister