The thinking behind the 32GB Windows Format limit on FAT32

Changes, especially in a large system with a large user base, require extensive testing, and even small changes may come with a lot of red tape. I don't know how things work at Microsoft, but I wouldn't be surprised if making changes to the UI for a technology that's being superseded anyway just didn't make anybody's list.

Therefore FAT32 will remain preferred until the patents expire on exFAT, even though the specification for exFAT has been released, things like that have proven to be not good enough until after the patents expire.

The purpose of exFAT appears mainly to be an attempt to foist a new encumbered filesystem on developers now that the first mainstream Microsoft filesystem is in the public domain.

We will know when Microsoft has reduced their anti-user stance on filesystems after they have released very detailed full NTFS specifications in the most useful way possible.

Also I have the greatest respect for Dave, and like he mentioned he was only doing the UI not the bitmoving of the actual Format process.

Those who were developing the NT version of FAT32 formatting failed in much more serious ways where Dave did not.

The inconsistency compared to FAT32 formatted by W9x is actually intolerable.

Best reliability still requires booting to the DOS from W98SE to properly format FAT32.

But for a fun fact, if you see many embedded systems that say they can only support an SD card up to 32 GB, it is a soft limitation due to the fact that media over 32 GB are pre-formatted to exFAT (and the system lacks support for exFAT). FAT32 can go up to 2 TB. So I have found that reformatting a larger media back to FAT32 makes it recognizable to that system with all of the storage space.

You seem to be very optimistic about how fast these get implemented into embedded devices.

I have had issues with ntfs getting corrupted and losing file both in mac and linux at times so there's that risk with implementation too.

Has there been any changes to these since MS has opened the license to exFAT?

[0] Non-native english speakers may be confused by this: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/as%20is%20someone...

Erm, because that was the idea? SDXC is a big racket and Microsoft has been collecting patent fees from any kind of consumer device that's capable of reading memory cards thanks to the filesystem requirements in the standard.

This can also really hurt in unexpected ways with otherwise badly written drivers. Nintendo's driver for the switch would constantly write to the table unnecessarily, and while this doesn't do all that much in normal operation (other than waste a small number of writes), it made it drastically more likely (in some cases for some games almost guaranteed) that the table would be partially written and corrupt if the system crashed or lost power unexpectedly. When some new Pokemon games came out and were initially a bit unstable this came up a lot.

Instead the code sat untouched for decades as the limit slowly became more and more unreasonable.

IMHO the real issue is the artificial limit. Instead of straight up disallowing you from creating large filesystems, it should have had a dialog box warning about small files being inefficient but letting you make it anyway.

But we have to admit that storage has leapt hugely in size and very rapidly. In 1990 or thereabouts, a common hard disk size was about 30 megabytes. Today I have files that are many times that size, and we think that that is quite normal. A mere five or so years later around 1996, that size had jumped to 4000 megabytes! These days my laptop has 6 million megabytes.

We can't blame filesystem planners for lack of foresight. They were blind-sided by progress just like the rest of us were.