Making those clusters huge would make for an equally huge volume, but at a horrifying cost in terms of wasted space: select a 32-kilobyte cluster size and even the few bytes needed by a 'Hello World' file would snaffle the full 32k. The options would define the size of the volume FAT32 has a set maximum number of clusters in a volume. As he admired his design genius, he pondered what cluster sizes to offer the potential army of future Windows NT 4.0 users. Part of that was a redo of Windows Format ('it had to be a replacement and complete rewrite since the Win95 system was so markedly different') and, as well as the grungy lower-level bits going down to the API, he also knocked together the classic, stacked Format dialog over the course of an hour of UI creativity. From the report: In the closing years of the last century, Plummer was involved in porting the Windows 95 shell to Windows NT. This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Robin.The reason why the Windows UI has a 32GB limit on the formatting of FAT32 volumes is because retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer 'said so.' The confession comes 'in the latest of a series of anecdotes hosted on his YouTube channel Dave's Garage,' reports The Register. Select the drive in the left-hand sidebar.įrom the Scheme menu, select Master Boot Record.Ĭlick Erase and follow prompts to confirm. Launch Disk Utility (from Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility). While first ensuring you have a copy of any data on a drive you want to format as ExFAT, as formatting will erase the drive’s contents, follow these steps:

Instead, pick ExFAT, its replacement (and still quite old), best used on drives of 32GB or larger capacity. Designed for an earlier time, it can’t handle files larger than 4GB.

If you’re both Mac users, swell with Mac and Windows in the mix, you might be tempted to pick FAT32 when formatting that thumb drive.īut FAT32 is distinctly out of date.

But it still crops up whenever you’re trying to put files on a USB thumb drive to hand off to someone else. For those of us who rarely transfer files physically across devices, file-format capability may be a distant memory.

Format big drive to fat32