Besides new Sandbox, Microsoft wants to raise Windows 11 FAT32 limit to 2TB soon

The latest release on the Windows 11 Canary Channel, build 27686, is chock-full of new and interesting stuff. As the headlining feature, Microsoft announced a new Sandbox Client preview that Insiders can now try.

Aside from that, the company has also announced that it is finally making a major change to the FAT32 partition size as it is increasing the format limit to 2 TB from the current one of 32 GB. It writes:

When formatting disks from the command line using the format command, we’ve increased the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to 2TB.

While this limit could have been bypassed via other means, Windows has had this limit imposed for a very long time.

Do bear in mind though that testing a feature in the Canary Channel does not guarantee it will definitely be generally available, but there is a good chance that it will eventually show up if all goes as planned.

As you can see in the example image below, X user and Windows enthusiast Xeno shows how they were able to successfully format a 114.6 GB drive, which was not possible prior to this build. Hopefully, Microsoft will one day bring such a change to the GUI-based Format dialog box too, thus making it easier for the non-techie public.

This is not the only File System-related improvement Microsoft has made in this build. As spotted by another X user and Windows enthusiast PhantomOcean3, the new build raises the ReFS (Resilient File System) version support to 3.15, although the user notes that Windows still supports previous version 3.14.

If you have not been following the integration and slow expansion of ReFS support on Windows, Microsoft, back in March 2023 at Build, launched its ReFS-based Dev Drives that were touted to be up to 30% faster. These Dev Drives are essentially VHDs (virtual hard disks) and they too have received improvements in the latest build. You can read about them in the dedicated coverage of the build 27686 we have linked above.