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
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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.
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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.