thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

IT Support & Hardware · Foundational

File Allocation Table 32 (FAT32)

A legacy file system with broad compatibility but a 4 GB maximum file size.

Definition

FAT32 works on Windows, macOS, Linux, cameras, and game consoles, but files cannot exceed 4 GB and Windows' format tool limits new FAT32 volumes to 32 GB. It lacks permissions and journaling. The EFI System Partition uses FAT32.

Example

Copying a 6 GB video to a FAT32 USB drive fails with 'file too large'.

Exam tip

FAT32 = 4 GB max file size; use exFAT or NTFS for larger files.

Don't confuse it with

Related terms