file and folder liimts on single drive

[klamerus]

are the maximum number of folders and files on a single logical volume?

We want to take the content of a file share in the office (WIndows) and put it on an external hard-drive. It's all old stuff, but we can't afford to throw it away either. We want to make a couple o copies for safety purposes and just delete it off our server.

We have two of these servers. One has almost 500,000 folders containint about 8-10 million files. The other has about 100,000 folders, but probably 15,000,000 files.

Other than the sheer space, is there a limit to what we can put on a large external drive? I know I have > 1 million files on my D drive on my laptop (never counted folders).

We'd be using NTFS file system and the folders and such would never individually contain > 5000 to 10,000 files (probably in the 5,000 range most of the time.

 

[porkchopexpress]

Looking at this thread the maximum is "The maximum number of files on an NTFS volume is 2^32 - 1. Table 3.12 lists
NTFS size limits." I'm not sure that this will apply to GPT disks under x64 versions or 2003 SP1 as they can now address far larger volumes at they don't use a partition table.

http://forumz.tomshardware.com/software/million-limit-Windows-2000-2003-IIS-ftopict199563.html

 

[porkchopexpress]

Here is a good link on Technet

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Windo...bf8e-4164-862d-dac5418c59481033.mspx?mfr=true

If you use large numbers of files in an NTFS folder (300,000 or more), disable short-file name generation for better performance, and especially if the first six characters of the long file names are similar.

 

[kmcferrin]

I thought that GPT was only available on Itanium systems? Is it an option on x64 now too?

 

[porkchopexpress]

It was but i think they can now be used on SP1 and above servers but they can't be used as bootable partitions.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/LUN_SP1.mspx

 

[klamerus]

What about the limits on the numbers of folders on a volume?

 

[porkchopexpress]

I'm not sure i'm afraid but i would imagine it is so high that you will experience performance issues before you get anywhere near the limit and would be better off creating multiple partitions.

 

[klamerus]

I would nope not. I would expect it would be related to how many are in any single spot, not how many in general.

For instance, I have a tool we're using in the office. It has a folder structure it uses for storing contents. It uses 2 value hex 00-ff as a foldering scheme. Each one of these folders contains the same and each one of those contains the same. Then finally at the bottom it has 00-ff files in those folders. In total it has a lot, but we're doing this across many drives.

Perhaps that's my answer. The system doesn't "have" to do this across so many drives. That's just what we've done. It's designed to do this in one volume.

So that would be 256^3 values. That's 16 million.

 

[kmcferrin]

To be honest, I've never run into a problem (even with ridiculously large filesystems, were talking multi-terabyte user shares) with having either too many files or folders. The only issue that I have run into is having directory paths that are too long/deep.