According to Dave Plummer, a retired Windows Engineer, there are actually bugs in some of the windows components because he intended for them to be temporary solutions, like the CPU or Hard Drive usage numbers had to be Massaged to be lower than 100%, for example. When the Task Manager doesn't respond you can actually use Ctrl+Shift+Esc to queue up a new Task Manager if the old one doesn't revive itself. That stuff hasn't changed since 1996.

He also wrote the File Formatter, which has a file size limit of 32Gb for the Fat32 format for the same reason: it wasn't supposed to be permanent, but it hasn't changed for over 20 years. The concept at the time was that Cluster Slack would make a large drives like a terabyte more than 99% wasted space in the format, so 32Gb was arbitrarily chosen as a limit.

[–] EddoWagt@feddit.nl 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

He also wrote the File Formatter, which has a file size limit of 32Gb for the Fat32 format for the same reason: it wasn't supposed to be permanent, but it hasn't changed for over 20 years.

I was thinking about this recently, so it is a bug, not a feature

[–] CucumberFetish@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago

If it has been a bug for 20+ years, we can safely say it's a feature for backwards compatibility.

[–] doctorcrimson@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I mean, it was intentional in a way, so the definition of bug is hazy, but the functioning version would be the ExFAT format.

[–] EddoWagt@feddit.nl 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

But the problem isn't in Fat32 itself, as you can format larger disks in that format just fine

[–] doctorcrimson@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Yes, the final line of my comment explains that, it's just that the cluster size in Fat32 has a lower bound so if you have files smaller than the cluster then they take a whole cluster, and that can lead to cluster slack that is vast majority wasted space.

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