Dave Plummer, a retired Microsoft engineer, answered this question, thinking about how to bring good potential support to Windows users.
If the default cluster size is too large, the cost of wasting disk space will be huge. For example, when it is set to 32KB, even a ‘Hello, World’ program as small as a few bytes will occupy a complete 32KB storage space.
After weighing the pros and cons, Dave finally decided to set the upper limit of the FAT32 file system format to 32GB. And the large-capacity memory cards on the market that year generally only had a 16MB version.
The above scheme has been well maintained for 25 years until the NTFS file system format succeeds FAT32 and becomes the mainstream.
Interestingly, Windows NT 4.0 does not natively support FAT32 (until the service pack is patched), and the Wintel Alliance also needs third-party drivers to support FAT32.
(Via)
