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Windows File Systems Limits

Started by Grok, March 17, 2004, 12:34 PM

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Grok

This might help someone, someday, and didn't want to lose track of the information.

From the filesystem team's internal website:

Maximum file size:
FAT16 = 2^32-1 (that's 4GB minus one byte)
FAT32 = 2^32-1
NTFS = 2^44-64KB (that's 16TB - 64KB and has been tested!)
UDF = 2^64-1

And just for kicks...

Maximum volume size:
FAT16 = 2GB (Win9x) or 4GB (Win2K)
FAT32 = 4,177,918 clusters (Win9x) or 2^32-1 sectors (all OSes)
NTFS = 2^32 allocation unites (tested to 17TB)

Files per volume:
FAT16 = 2^16
FAT32 = 2^32
NTFS = 2^32-1 (that's four billion files)

Files per directory:
FAT16 = 2^16-2 physical directory entries (affected by long filenames)
FAT32 = 2^16-2 physical directory entries (affected by long filenames)
NTFS = No limit

My parenthetical notes are abbreviations of the full explanations given by
the filesystem team but retain the essence of the footnotes.

NTFS can have 4^32-1 folders, since a folder in the NTFS filesystem is just
a file with special attributes.

iago

Do they have info about Linux files systems? ext2/ext3/reiserFS?
This'll make an interesting test for broken AV:
QuoteX5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*