FAT (File Allocation Table) file system is created in 1977 by Microsoft, and FAT32 (File Allocation Table 32) is the most common version of FAT. FAT32 has been widely used all through the DOS years, and can even be used in Mac OS X. But now it is losing popularity due to the FAT32 partition size limit.

Why?
To answer this question, we have to mention another file system, which is called NTFS.

NTFS (New Technology File System) is a newer file system. First introduced in 1993, NTFS was not that popular on personal computers until the release of Windows XP in 2001. Then in Windows 7 and 8, NTFS was set as default file system on new PCs because it is superior to FAT32 in many aspects - more secure, robust, and supports larger file sizes and drives.

Compared with NTFS, FAT32 has the following limits: 
  • FAT32 max partition size - 2TB. If you have a 3TB drive, you couldn’t format it as a single FAT32 partition. Please note that you need the help of a third-party partition manager to create such a huge partition. If you turn to Windows Disk Management, the largest partition size it helps to create is 32GB, and Extend Volume option is greyed out happens when the partition already occupies 32GB capacity, no matter there is unallocated space following it or not.
  • FAT32 is not a journaling file system, which means that file system corruption can happen much more easily. With NTFS, changes are logged to a “journal” on the drive before they’re actually made. If the computer suffers power failure during the file writing process, the system won’t need a long Scandisk operation to recover.
  • FAT32 doesn’t support file permissions. With NTFS, file permissions allow for higher security. System files can be set as read-only so that typical programs cannot modify them, and some users can be prevented from looking at personal files, and so on.