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Friday 11 February 2011

16TB limit on NTFS Volume!

I have been working on upgrading my server (Areca-1230) with 12x2TB drives and hit a volume/partition limit at 16TB.

I stuck the 12x2TB drives in a RAID5 (could have used RAID 6 but its sloooooow!) and discovered I couldnt create a partition in windows server 2008 R2 larger than 16TB without using the format /A command. This basically allows you to specify your own cluster size and as you can see from the following link, certain cluster sizes limit your ability to create certain size volumes (see David Shens reply):

Clicky!--->Cluster Sizes<----Clicky!

The moral of this blog post is, before you create a monster volume double check your cluster size otherwise (as I found out) you wont get very far!

Of course you could just have a few smaller volumes running from one giant raidset but wheres the fun in that?
Thanks for reading :)