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WHS has maximum capacity of 16TB. Can this be changed by increasing the cluster size on the drives? RRS feed

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    As I understand it there is a hard-limit to capacity and that it is caused by the default 4kb cluster size that it formats the drives with. Can changing the cluster size to 64k eliminate the capacity issue? If so, how is this done? Also, will that impact how WHS stores data in unique and non-duplicated clusters?
    The reason I am asking is that I am getting ready to build a Home Server and although I don't need that much capacity now I can easily see the need appearing. I have started converting family movies (both film and 8mm) and I will likely pile up many terabytes before I am done. When duplication is fully enabled I will not be able to store more than 8TB of data and I see that as a problem. The case I have selected can hold 17 drives so I could very easily exceed this limit before filling the case.
    Friday, January 16, 2009 9:28 PM

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    Hello,
    the limitation of WHS is 2 TByte per physical drive/volume, which is caused by the fact, that there is no support for GPT volumes built in.
    All other limits are more or less caused by the hardware (i.e. how much drives can be addressed by the controllers etc). I have already read about WHS systems with 21 (or more) TB.
    Best greetings from Germany
    Olaf
    Friday, January 16, 2009 9:34 PM
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    Every physical disk in your server is a separate volume; the 16 TB limit is not for the storage pool as a whole, but rather for each disk in the storage pool. Accordingly, while there may be a theoretical limit on the size of the storage pool, it is not limited on the server by the NTFS file system. There's no need to take specific action to bypass this limit on the server. If a client PC has problems with a large volume on the server, that's a different question. But in my observation, Windows operating systems don't have an issue with a very large network volume.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Sunday, January 18, 2009 9:32 PM
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    Hello,
    the limitation of WHS is 2 TByte per physical drive/volume, which is caused by the fact, that there is no support for GPT volumes built in.
    All other limits are more or less caused by the hardware (i.e. how much drives can be addressed by the controllers etc). I have already read about WHS systems with 21 (or more) TB.
    Best greetings from Germany
    Olaf
    Friday, January 16, 2009 9:34 PM
    Moderator
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    I understand the 2TB logical drive limit. That would only prevent the use of large arrays (since there are no physical drives larger than 2TB (the WD drive is almost released). I have heard several reports of a hard cluster limit to the 32-bit O/S. I guess that means that the O/S can only manage 4 billion clusters in the same way that it can only address 4GB of RAM. If this is the case it could be easily solved by increasing the cluster size, but that might not be possible due to way that WHS functions.
    Saturday, January 17, 2009 3:37 AM
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    Microsoft confirms that the 16TB limit for a single NTFS volume using 4K clusters is real. In order to exceed that capacity a larger cluster size must be used or another volume must be created. Is either of those actions possible within WHS, and if so how are they accomplished? I am guessing that the 'storage pool' is just a dynamic volume. Can WHS use more than one? If people have made servers with larger capacities, how have they bypassed this hard limit?
    Sunday, January 18, 2009 8:27 PM
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    Every physical disk in your server is a separate volume; the 16 TB limit is not for the storage pool as a whole, but rather for each disk in the storage pool. Accordingly, while there may be a theoretical limit on the size of the storage pool, it is not limited on the server by the NTFS file system. There's no need to take specific action to bypass this limit on the server. If a client PC has problems with a large volume on the server, that's a different question. But in my observation, Windows operating systems don't have an issue with a very large network volume.
    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Sunday, January 18, 2009 9:32 PM
    Moderator