Real Quick Question - Windows XP Max HD Capacity

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As per title really, am trying to find out if there is a limit to the amount of hard disk capacity you can have while running Windows XP Home. I am looking to build a file server and before I start buying hard drives, am trying to find out if there is an upper limit that the OS can handle. For some reason I cant explain, I have a feeling that it was mentioned elsewhere that it is limited to 3Tb but is that right?
 
The theoretical limit is 2^64 -1 clusters however XP can only cope with 2^32 -1 clusters. This is still pretty big mind, 16Tb with 4K clusters and 256Tb with 64K clusters.

If you want to go above 2Tb though you need to use dynamic volumes rather than traditional primary & secondary partitions.
 
rpstewart said:
The theoretical limit is 2^64 -1 clusters however XP can only cope with 2^32 -1 clusters. This is still pretty big mind, 16Tb with 4K clusters and 256Tb with 64K clusters.

If you want to go above 2Tb though you need to use dynamic volumes rather than traditional primary & secondary partitions.

now u sound like u know what you're talking about - what are dynamic volumes when they're at home? :confused:
 
Alty said:
now u sound like u know what you're talking about

Comes with being an IT consultant, I can talk the talk but I fall flat on my face if I have to walk the walk :p

Anyhoo, these dynamic volume things - they're just a different way of dealing with storage than the usual basic disk methods. I'm not sure of the exact technicalities but dynamic volumes allow you to do things like striped, spanned or mirrored volumes across multiple physical disks in software. Therefore you're not limited to the hardware you have - if you're a total nut job masochist you can do RAID0 across and IDE disk, a SATA one and a SCSI one.

You can also mount dynamic disks, UNIX style, on paths off another disk so your My Documents folder could still, to the OS, reside in c:\documents and settings\blah but could physically sit on a separate HDD.
 
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