Microsoft officially announced in 1999 that Windows 95 does not support hard disks over
32 GB in size. For that reason, I am including this in my discussion of hard disk capacity
barriers. However, I must embarrassingly admit that after many months of trying to
determine the reason for this exclusion, I have been unable to find out what it is! So I
can't give an explanation for this limit, because I don't know myself. All I know is that
Microsoft would not officially announce that Windows 95 could not handle hard disks over
32 GB if it could--at least, I don't think they would, would they? ;^) At any
rate, you can read their knowledge base article on the subject here
and make up your own mind. Don't expect to find any details there however, or I'd discuss
them myself.
All Microsoft says for its description of the limit is "32 GB"; since I don't
know the details behind this I don't know the exact number that the capacity limit
represents. In the same knowledge base article where Microsoft says Windows 95 won't
support drives over 32 GB, they say that Windows 98 (and presumbly, Windows ME) will
support drives over 32 GB, but that a patch may be needed due to a bug in Scandisk on
drives over 32 GB in size. It may be that this Scandisk problem is the same as the one that caused Microsoft to write
off large drives under Windows 95. Microsoft may have just decided it would not bother to
patch Windows 95. Alternatively, they could be separate issues.
Next: The 65,536 Cylinder (31.5 GiB / 33.8 GB) Barrier
