Information on File and Folder Limits 

I got this information from Ask Leo. I have it pasted here to avoid broken links. If you want to see it from that site, click here

File System	Max disk size	Max file size	Max number of files on Disk	Max number of files in a single folder
FAT16	4 Gig	4 Gig	65,517	512
FAT32	2 Tera	4 Gig	268,435,437	65,534
NTFS	256 Tera	256 Tera	4,294,967,295	4,294,967,295

NOTE: Disk mentioned above is not necessarily talking about physical drives but rather "logical" disks. No one makes a 256 terabyte disk drive, but using NTFS you can treat an array of disk drives as a single logical disk. Presumably if you have enough of them, you can build a huge logical drive.

 

So there are two important take-aways from all that data

1. Nowhere was there a limit of the size of the contents of a folder. Limits on the number of files, yes, but nothing size related.

2. You probably want to make sure your disk is formatted NTFS. FAT32's 4 gigabytes for a single file just isn't enough anymore, especially if you're collecting video or other storage-intensive media.

The root of a drive can only hold a limited amount of files, but it can hold several folders. For information on limit on the root drive, click here.