How large a capacity of hard disk drive can NT support?
NT can view a maximum partition size of 2 terabytes (or 2,199,023,255,552 bytes), however there are limitations that restrict you well below this number. FAT has internal limits of 4 GB due to the fact that it uses 16-bit fields to store file sizes, 2^16 is 65,536 with a cluster size of 64 KB gives us the 4 GB. HPFS uses 32-bit fields and can therefore handle greater sized disks, but the largest single file size is 4 GB. HPFS allocates disk space in 512 byte sectors, which can cause problems in Asian markets where sector sizes are typically 1024 bytes, meaning HPFS cannot be used. NTFS uses 64-bits for all sizes, leading to a max size of….. 16 exabytes!!! (18,446,744,073,709,551,616 bytes), however NT could not handle a volume this big. For IDE drives, the maximum is 136.9 GB, however for a standard IDE drive this is constrained to 528 MB. The new EIDE drives can access much larger sizes. It is important to note that the System partition (holding ntldr, boot.ini, etc.) MUST be entire
