NTFS Volume Cluster Size Limitations

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

Allan74

Member
May 15, 2019
132
13
18
Is there any inherent danger in running an NTF Volume on the ragged edge of a given Cluster size's Volume size limits ?
(ie. single digit MBs under an 8k cluster size's file system limits)

I recently did an online expansion to an active RAID6 volume and essentially calculated down to the MB, after being denied any larger by Windows, leaving a small partition leftover, that I can work with, after growing the intended volume as much as possible.

I never planned on growing the volume in question and simply accepted default cluster size rec0ommendations when formatting and was too lazy to do a complete destructive re-build.
fdrive.JPG
 
Last edited:

BoredSysadmin

Not affiliated with Maxell
Mar 2, 2019
1,050
437
83

tl;dr: For 8k cluster size, max volume size is indeed 32TB.
There's no danger, except you won't be able to grow that volume any further.

p.s: Acronis Disk Director may be able to change cluster size without reformating, but only on unused space
 
Last edited:

cesmith9999

Well-Known Member
Mar 26, 2013
1,417
468
83
I have in the past used larger sector sizes without issue. The only issue that I have run across is when the volume gets corrupted. Large volumes take a long time to run through CHKDSK. I mean in the order of DAYS, not hours.

Make sure that you have a backup of the volume as it is faster to restore from backup than to wait for chkdsk to finish.

Chris
 

edge

Active Member
Apr 22, 2013
203
71
28
Yes. School Buses are Yellow.
Tree access times degrade with depth due to iterative searching. To keep access times acceptable, larger size storage pools require bigger cluster sizes to keep the tree search iterations down. Higher bus and memory bandwidth assuage loading the larger blocks.

Same thing occurred in memory; i.e. small pages vs large pages.

There is no danger in maxing out the pool size for a specific cluster size - the math of tree sizing is solid and well known.

Tradeoffs.