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I finally managed to save up to upgrade from 4x4TB drives (in two separate RAID 1s) to just two 18TB in RAID 1. I copied the partitions from each RAID 1 to the new RAID 1 since that works the quickest without any of the complications. Once I migrated the data from the second partition to the first I deleted the second partition. Everything is working great so far except...

Once I only had a single partition on my 18TB RAID 1 setup Paragon Hard Disk Manager refuses to allow me to use the last ~380GB of space left on the drives! If I manually set 0 to the start or end it moves the extra space number to the corresponding opposite side!

Paragon Hard Disk Manager not using full disk for single partition 18TB

I absolutely don't want any empty space or additional partitions; that was a large part of why I went from 4TB to 18TB.

How do I force Paragon Hard Disk Manager to use the full disk space for the single partition?

Giacomo1968
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John
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2 Answers2

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I took a chance and used MiniTool Partition Wizard 12 which did allow me to resize the partition to use the full disk capacity.

Only one downside: it did not warn me that it would have to adjust all of the data on the entire disk! With 7.7TB on an 18TB RAID 1 setup that took less than 24 hours but still! So it clearly adjusted the cluster size from whatever it was to 8.1KB (supporting up to 32TB on NTFS) which is fine, it's intended for large file storage any way.

So yes, some software will automatically adjust the cluster size (MiniTool Partition Wizard 12) and some won't (Paragon Hard Disk Manager). Just be aware that if you set a partition to use the full size and it doesn't that you'll want to clone your drive to an external and then make the adjustment otherwise you risk losing all of the data if something happens during the process.

John
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Ah, I've had a similar case and was curious too, so I did some digging.

When you have really large partitions with over 10 TB, the only way to make this work on a GPT partition, is to have really large cluster sizes. While this is not really a problem for the user, it will mean that a cluster can be 512MB big. If the partition is resized to max, it will always have a small gap at the very end. The larger the cluster size is, the larger this space can be, up to whatever the clustersize is.

A partitionscheme has some overhead by itself which also factors into play. This behavior can also be seen in virtual disks. You create a 20TB virtual disk with dynamic size, and while the disk is completely empty, you find out that it already takes up around 700MB~1GB of space. If you create a small partition or a small disk, you'll find out that this space is smaller too.

So if you were to make the current partition 14TB, you'd have about 2TB left. You create a new partition in this place, and you'll find that the space after this partition is a lot less because it can use a smaller cluster size.

Do note, I don't exactly know where the limit is for cluster sizes. Could be 2TB where it goes into the largest size, but not 100% sure.

LPChip
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