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I've been trying to format a 16TB external hard drive in the file system FAT32 so that it would work on a PS3 and I quickly realised that windows won't allow me to format the drive completely. I managed to bypass the windows 32GB restriction by using 3rd party software but I was then further restricted by a 2TB limitation. I asked a friend how he has his PS3 setup and he said he has an 8TB external hard drive in the FAT32 filesystem. I didn't believe him at first but he showed me the drive and it is indeed formatted entirely in the FAT32 file system. I have attached an image of the drives, my friends being disk 3 and mine being disk 4.

I’m not sure how to proceed except making multiple partitions so finally I ask you smarter folk how I would format my 16TB external hard drive to FAT32 file system?

I tried to change the cluster size with the command below command but I was unsuccessful.

hdparm --set-sector-size 4096 --please-destroy-my-drive /dev/sdX

I then removed the enclosure of my friends and my external hard drive and tried my friend’s enclosure with my drive and it formatted the entire drive in FAT32.

I will now need to test if my old enclosure will work with the newly formated drive or not but I'll try and figure out them problems myself as I've taken enough of your time. Thanks for your responses and thank you Kamil for your lengthy response.

Playdoh Legs
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  • MBR has a limit of 2TB, so at a minimum it would have to be GPT partitioned. After that 18TB is going to mean some huge cluster size which will waste space. – Mokubai May 27 '23 at 11:59
  • @Mokubai that's not true. [MBR has an actual limit of 2³³ - 2 sectors](https://superuser.com/a/1577918/241386), so the limit is ~4TB on disks with 512-byte sector and ~32TB on disks with 4KB sector, with the caveat that the last partition needed to be span the whole half disk – phuclv May 27 '23 at 13:17
  • Mokubai and phuclv, the limit is 2^32 for one partition (4 bytes width for the cluster number) times sector size. With a typical 512 byte (=2^9) sector size that gives 2^41 bytes. phuvlc, 2^33 is wrong, "-2 sectors" should be precise as the lowest cluster number is 2 if I remember correctly. – r2d3 May 27 '23 at 22:01
  • @r2d3 with two ~2³²-sector partition you will have a ~2³³-sector drive. Did you even read the link above? – phuclv May 28 '23 at 05:53
  • See [Working Around MBR's Limitations](https://www.rodsbooks.com/gdisk/workarounds.html), Linux and newer Windows all have full capability to support a 4TB MBR disk on 512-byte sector – phuclv May 28 '23 at 06:03
  • phuclv, no I did not read your link pointing to your article. As for the article by Rod Smith I can't find content that supports the claim "Linux and newer Windows all have full capability to support a 4TB MBR disk on 512-byte sector". I refer to the German computer journal c't 2012, issue 11, page 175: "Ein Trick ermöglicht die Einteilung von bis zu 4 Tebibyte großen Festplatten mit einem MBR; die hinterste Partition kann allerdings nur Linux verwenden." (Translation: A trick enables to partition a disk with up to 4 TiB with a MBR, the last partition can only be used by linux). – r2d3 May 28 '23 at 09:25
  • Maybe that changed in the mean time? I apologize for my critics, because technically you are absolutely right about the limits of MBR (4TiB with a sector size of 512 byte) but unfortunately the size of a partition within that scheme is limited to 2,2 TiB. – r2d3 May 28 '23 at 09:28
  • It can be done easily with a tool>>>>https://www.howtogeek.com/316977/how-to-format-usb-drives-larger-than-32gb-with-fat32-on-windows/ – Moab May 28 '23 at 16:04

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The limit depends on the logical sector size.

The FAT32 boot sector uses a 32-bit field for the sector count, limiting the maximal FAT32 volume size to 2 terabytes with a sector size of 512 bytes. The maximum FAT32 volume size is 16 TB with a sector size of 4,096 bytes.

(source)

Your friend's drive apparently uses 4096. Yours – 512, I guess.

In some HDDs this can be changed (example).

Some USB enclosures translate sector sizes on the fly. Maybe your friend's external drive appears to use 4096 not because of the drive itself, but because of the enclosure. If you can, try to use your drive with the friend's enclosure and see if you can use FAT32 in this configuration (backup your data first).

This feature (some would say: misfeature) is rarely advertised. Usually you buy an enclosure, use it, and only then learn how it behaves.

Kamil Maciorowski
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