While FAT has always supported volumes up to 2TB, Windows has stubbornly clung to this 32GB limit for nearly three decades.

“When formatting disks from the command line using the format command, we’ve increased the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to 2TB,” the Windows team revealed in a blog post on Thursday, detailing the latest Windows 11 Canary test build.

However, don’t get too excited just yet. For now, this change only applies to the command-line format command. The existing format dialogue box will continue to sport the 32GB limit unless Microsoft decides to give this ancient feature a much-needed update.

The 32GB limit was initially set during the development of Windows 95, over 30 years ago.

Former Windows developer Dave Plummer confessed earlier this year that he was the mastermind behind the format dialog box that hasn’t seen a facelift in decades.

He also admitted to picking the 32GB limit for FAT32. “I also had to decide how much ‘cluster slack’ would be too much, and that wound up constraining the format size of a FAT volume to 32GB,”

“That limit was also an arbitrary choice that morning and one that has stuck with us as a permanent side effect.”

Windows has long supported reading FAT32 partitions up to 2TB, but creating one within the OS has required third-party tools—until now.

Hopefully, Microsoft will update the format GUI in future Windows 11 builds, making it easier for everyone to create full FAT32 partitions.

While the partition limit for FAT32 is being extended, the 4GB size limit on individual files stored on a FAT32 volume remains. FAT32 isn’t as popular these days as alternatives like exFAT, but it’s still used by many older devices that require USB drives or SD cards formatted with FAT32.