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Searchdomino's expert advice

Searchdomino.com went downhill a long time ago. One of my accounts is still subscribed to the newsletter however, and occasionally I actually read them (woah). The one I read today made me wonder why I bother.

The article is here if you can be bothered, but you can read on anyway regardless.

The question:

I am experiencing an issue with Notes 5.0.10 on a Windows 2000 server. We have not upgraded but it was said that a file could be of unlimited size. But now that our file has gotten to 64GB, we can no longer add anything to it. Was this a bug that I somehow missed?

and the answer:

This could be a limit on database size that you have dumped into. But 64GB is really big. At that size, you are asking for trouble, even if it is supposed to work. My advice is that, if you can, to split the database somehow, or archive parts of it, to make it smaller.

Wow that's helpful. Telling them that their big file is indeed, pretty big. Thanks for that. From memory the Domino Administrator in R5 showed up as 'Unlimited' which referred to the fact that you could place 4gb limitations on databases if you wanted, and that some databases which had been created under R4 inherited ODS limitations, so compared to that 64gb was close to unlimited. I remember reading some vaugely funny things talking about Lotus's idea of what Unlimited actually meant, but can't recall exactly.

Either way if I was passing myself off as an expert I might consider doing a bit of research instead of just saying "Woah dude, that's like, a big file and stuff!".

A helpful reader pointed out that 64gb might have been the maximum filesize in Windows. Microsoft has supplied some information about this in various places, but you have to worry when they talk about theoretical limitations in their own OS. If you guys don't know what's actually going to work then who does?

In theory, the maximum NTFS volume size is 264 clusters. However, there are limitations to the maximum size of a volume, such as volume tables. By industry standards, volume tables are limited to 232 sectors.

Sector size, another limitation, is typically 512 bytes. While sector sizes might increase in the future, the current size puts a limit on a single volume of 2 terabytes (232 * 512 bytes, or 241 bytes). For now, 2 terabytes is considered the practical limit for both physical and logical volumes using NTFS.

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  Print | posted on Monday, March 06, 2006 10:48 PM





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# Searchdomino's expert advice

So it's slightly unrelated but 2TB is the SCSI limit for a Volume. If you want a bigger one you need to split your disk up into 2TB volumes and use your OS to put them together at the other end.. Windows can definatly cope with mre than 2TB volumes.. The sector size stuff etc is the Physical limits (SCSI in this case). If you were using Fibre disk you would not have this issue :-) SATA is a slightly different matter but at this time most of the SATA controllers use the SCSI standards at the back end so suffer the same problem.
3/7/2006 11:16 AM | Doug
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# Searchdomino's expert advice

Oh... One correction. Fibre is the same as SCSI, don't know why I thought it was different..
3/7/2006 11:22 AM | Doug
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# Searchdomino's expert advice

Thanks for clearing that up Doug ;)
3/7/2006 12:42 PM | Merauder
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# Searchdomino's expert advice

It's not often I get to contribute :-)

But on the origional issue, the Volume and the File sizes are quite different for NTFS.. I recall the file size was quite alot smaller than the volume size. 64GB does seem quite small though !! It thought is was around 16000TB :-p

3/7/2006 3:57 PM | Doug

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Merauderweb is the personal website of a New Zealand based web developer and technologist, covering whatever interests or amuses him. Subjects include online gaming, music, gadgets/technology, ASP.NET, Web Development, JavaScript, jQuery, IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and are presented in a linkblog/tumble style.

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