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Any way to make a drive bigger than 10TB?


filthyrich

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Just for directory simplification, is there any way to make a drive bigger than 10TB?

 

Thanks!

 

Just type it in, specifically.

 

The 10TB is the max displayed by default, but the limit is actually 1PB (1000TB)

 

Thats just the largest value in the dropdown, you can type into it too, the largest NTFS formatted it can do is 256TB, but it will let you create larger if you want to use a different file system. You can also resize once its created.

 

Yes and no.

 

The largest an NTFS volume can be is 256TBs, but that's not the limit for the disk.   You can create multiple partitions (volumes) on the drive that are 256TB each. And then you could (shamelessly self-promotion) use StableBit DrivePool to pool these partitions together.  :)

 

 

 

Additionally, on Windows 8 and up, you can format the StableBit CloudDrive as ReFS (even without the normal "hack" to enable ReFS).  

 

ReFS has a max volume size of 1YB, which is a billion PB's.   So ... plenty large enough. :)

 

 

 

That said, NTFS has specific volume size limitations based on the cluster size used when formatting. 

The default (4kb) cluster size has a limit of 16TBs per volume.

 8KB cluster limits you to 32TB

16KB cluster limits you to 64TB

32KB cluster limits you to 128TB

64KB cluster limits you to 256TB

 

And 64KB clusters are the largest available for NTFS.  Hence the limit of 256TB per volume/partition. 
 
 
This information is taken into account and the "best" option will be used based on the disk size. At least up to 256TBs.  Any further than that, and you need to use ReFS or you need to manually partition and format the drive. 
 
 
 
As for adverse affects, the larger cluster size.   It means more discreet units of data for storage.  
In fact, this is where the "slack space" from StableBit DrivePool comes from.
 
If you have a 2kb file, it's not going to use the full 4kb (or larger) cluster, and it doesn't share the cluster with other files. That means that the 2kb file has wasted 2kb of space.  The larger cluster size means that you are going to have a lot more "wasted space".  (that same 2kb file wastes 62kb on the 64kb cluster formatting). 

 

 

The upside is (obviously) larger partition size.  For spinning hard drives, this has other benefits as well.  larger blocks of contiguous data means better sequential performance and less fragmentation.  Both can improve performance.

 

And on my Seagate Archive drives, 4kb vs 64kb cluster size made a 15-20MB/s different in read speeds. 

 

But for a Clouddrive disk, this doesn't make as much of a difference, since the data is retrieved in 1MB parts, usually. 

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