Find Cluster Size in PartitionDealing with a data array of 24 physical disks. The controller is a MegaRaid/LSI/Avago/Broadcom 3108 firmware v24.9.0-0022. The physical disks are 500GB drives giving about 9TB.
Wanting to upgrade the storage space, I replaced the drives with 2 TB physical disks. This was done on-the-fly, 1-at-a-time so that the office was not disrupted. Fail disk, remove disk, insert new disk, let it re-raid. The process took about an hour a disk and I was able to complete over a few days.
With the new space available, I was able to grow the virtual-disk on the fly. Took about 8 hours to initialize.
With the disk space available, I wanted to expand the volume in Windows Disk Manager but got an error message:
"The volume cannot be extended because the number of clusters will exceed the maximum number of clusters supported by the file system."
Well, how many clusters do I have:
-type: fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo f:
This shows that the cluster size is 4kb; this is the default-size.
As such, the official docs say that the max size is 16TB:
| Cluster size | Largest volume | Largest file |
|---|---|---|
| 4 KB (default size) | 16 TB | 16 TB |
| 8 KB | 32 TB | 32 TB |
| 16 KB | 64 TB | 64 TB |
| 32 KB | 128 TB | 128 TB |
| 64 KB (maximum size) | 256 TB | 256 TB |
The only way around this is to reformat the drive with a larger cluster size.
NOTES:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/file-server/ntfs-overview