pbissegger
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Small Business Server 2003 - Disk full errors when there is plenty of disk space
Hi,
I'm running Windows SBS 2003 and I have a file server. Currently I have the file server on 100GB of partioned space, but I am getting a Disk Full error, and only have about 35GB used up.
FYI I have all my files under the same top-level shared folder. Could this be the problem ?
Please help !
I'm running Windows SBS 2003 and I have a file server. Currently I have the file server on 100GB of partioned space, but I am getting a Disk Full error, and only have about 35GB used up.
FYI I have all my files under the same top-level shared folder. Could this be the problem ?
Please help !
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From the below URL it appears you can have around 4 billion files per directory if NTFS.
http://www.syngress.com/book_catalog/305_win2lin/sample.pdf
NT File System (NTFS) - 4,294,967,295 files or folders per folder
Cheers
Ian
http://www.syngress.com/book_catalog/305_win2lin/sample.pdf
NT File System (NTFS) - 4,294,967,295 files or folders per folder
Cheers
Ian
We don't know if it's NTFS or FAT32, although for SBS, one would expect NTFS.
Also, you obviously cannot have 4 billion files on a 100 gig hard drive, since under NTFS, my recollection is that each file takes a minimum of 4K of disk space even if the file itself is of zero length. But I'm not sure if, even theoretically, the 4 billion number applies to the root directory.
Also, you obviously cannot have 4 billion files on a 100 gig hard drive, since under NTFS, my recollection is that each file takes a minimum of 4K of disk space even if the file itself is of zero length. But I'm not sure if, even theoretically, the 4 billion number applies to the root directory.
Yes, Having more than 256 files and folders in the top directory will do this. Make a public folder and move files there
keith
keith
I would suggest parkeriq has the most likely answer, though watzman does have a point.
To elaborate:
If quotas are enabled, especially on a shared disk, then you get "out of space" type errors and in most instances I've seen when people ask this question, it's a quota issue.
HOWEVER, IF any of the drives are FAT, THEN there's a root directory file limit of 512 (not 256). And if that limit is reached, then YES, out of space type errors occur.
I think explorer would have a problem LONG before reaching 4 billion files in a single folder (it tends to get unreasonably slow if you have more than 10K files. As for minimum disk space, the DEFAULT cluster size is 4K if I'm not mistaken. HOWEVER, it can be as large as 32K (again, if I remember correctly) or as SMALL as 512 BYTES (.5K). Clusters larger than 4K cannot be defragged (at least with any tool I've ever seen).
To elaborate:
If quotas are enabled, especially on a shared disk, then you get "out of space" type errors and in most instances I've seen when people ask this question, it's a quota issue.
HOWEVER, IF any of the drives are FAT, THEN there's a root directory file limit of 512 (not 256). And if that limit is reached, then YES, out of space type errors occur.
I think explorer would have a problem LONG before reaching 4 billion files in a single folder (it tends to get unreasonably slow if you have more than 10K files. As for minimum disk space, the DEFAULT cluster size is 4K if I'm not mistaken. HOWEVER, it can be as large as 32K (again, if I remember correctly) or as SMALL as 512 BYTES (.5K). Clusters larger than 4K cannot be defragged (at least with any tool I've ever seen).
Yes, it could be the problem. The root directory (the top level folder) has a limit to how many files it can hold. Not the size of the files, but the actual number of files. The limit is normally plenty large, but if you put everything there, you might have exceeded it. This will give a "disk full" message, even though the disk might have quite a bit of free space. What is actually happening is that the directory, rather than the disk file space is full, but the effect is the same, you can't put any more files on the disk.