When I had my 18TB drive filled I noticed I could not enable NTFS compression because the function was grayed out. I followed the directions here "Compress contents to save disk space" option not available for one partition and emptied out the drive to format it (took 3 weeks to find places to put the data), then realized that 4k cluster size is not an option for formatting a drive this large (options start from 8k). Was all this trouble for nothing? Partitioning is out of the question.
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Yes, it was for nothing .
NTFS partitions bigger than 16TB have a minimum cluster size of 8 KB (and partitions bigger than 2TB also have a minimum of 4 KB.)
As far as using a different file system, which might very well allow you larger cluster sizes, it's not going to help you for your goal, since the compression you are referring to is NTFS Compression which certainly won't be available for other file systems.
r2d3
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Yisroel Tech
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NTFS supports maximum 232 - 1 clusters, so for 4KB cluster the maximum size is (232 - 1)*4KB = 16TB. Therefore partitions larger than that can't use the default transparent compression. That doesn't mean compression can't be used because there are multiple compression algorithms in modern NTFS and many can be used on NTFS with large clusters with the caveats that
- You can't enable automatic compression on the drive or folders and have to compress files individually
- You can't edit the files on-the-fly, so compression will be much better but is only suitable for read-only files
For more details read the link above
There are other file systems that support transparent compression, however only Btrfs and ZFS have good Windows drivers: WinBtrfs and ZFSin
phuclv
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