XP Pro, How big of a raided drive can it see?

[Wes787]

We need to setup a raided drive that will save surveillance video footage.

We currently have two 1.1 TB hard drives made up of 5 drives each - raided.

We need to build a new server but I was curious how large of a raided hard drive can Windows XP Pro view? I was told it could view larger than 1.1 TB.

Does anyone know?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Wes

 

[LWComputingMVP]

NTFS - the native file system for XP can handle UP TO 16 Exabytes, but this depends on the block size. The typical 4K blocks that drives are formatted as by default maxes out at 2TB. If you format the drive with 8K blocks are larger you can exceed this limit.

 

[Wes787]

Thanks for your reply. What would be involved in formatting it to 8k blocks? Would that be considered allocation size? Would I need a special program for that? Also, would it count the whole hard drive space or would using 8k blocks lower the amount of space on the HD?

 

[LWComputingMVP]

When you format the disk you can select block size. For small files, you want to use small blocks. for large files (such as these, I suspect), you want to use large blocks. Blocks just determine the minimum space and in what increments space is used. For example, a file with a size of 200 bytes will use 4096 bytes of storage - a 4K block - on a 4K block formatted drive. In an 8K block formatted drive it would use 8192 bytes for that same 200 byte file.

There might be SLIGHT differences in total disk space available, I've not looked into this - the MFT tables MIGHT take up more space... but even if they do, they won't significantly decrease overall space.

 

[Wes787]

That does make sense

thanks for the explanation.

 

[linney]

How to locate and correct disk space problems on NTFS volumes in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315688/en-us?FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

Bits to Exabytes - Size Relationships

http://www.theeldergeek.com/bits_to_exabytes_-_size_relationships.htm

Windows XP Professional File Systems Overview

http://www.mcmcse.com/windows_xp/guides/filesystems.shtml

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...um+volume+size+supported+by+NTFS"&btnG=Search