Windows 10 USB Hard Drive Capacity Limits needed

[Moondoggy]

Can anyone tell me how much USB external drive space Windows 10 Pro can access in a single drive without having to partition the hard drive or use a special driver?

I use Acronis TrueImage to backup my hard drive in my PC. I currently use an older Seagate USB drive for my backups but this drive is so small that limits the number of backups I can retain to 3 backups. I would like to get a new external USB hard drive that has more capacity than I have today but it seems to me that I remember that there is some sort of limitation involving the size of the drive. Perhaps this limitation only applies to non-USB hard drives that are permanently mounted inside the case but before I go out and buy a 4 TB drive I want to know if I can use the entire storage capacity as a single hard drive and not have to try partitioning the drive into multiple drives. Can someone enlighten me in regard to any issues surrounding using a large capacity USB hard drive with a Windows 10 Pro PC that is about 6 years old and running the older type of BIOS from American Megatrends? Thanks.

 

[noidea_77]

It depends on the file system only. The typical file system for a big external disk is NTFS an that supports up to 16 exabyte: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/100108

 

[Jonas Magnusson]

Can anyone tell me how much USB external drive space Windows 10 Pro can access in a single drive without having to partition the hard drive or use a special driver?

I use Acronis TrueImage to backup my hard drive in my PC. I currently use an older Seagate USB drive for my backups but this drive is so small that limits the number of backups I can retain to 3 backups. I would like to get a new external USB hard drive that has more capacity than I have today but it seems to me that I remember that there is some sort of limitation involving the size of the drive. Perhaps this limitation only applies to non-USB hard drives that are permanently mounted inside the case but before I go out and buy a 4 TB drive I want to know if I can use the entire storage capacity as a single hard drive and not have to try partitioning the drive into multiple drives. Can someone enlighten me in regard to any issues surrounding using a large capacity USB hard drive with a Windows 10 Pro PC that is about 6 years old and running the older type of BIOS from American Megatrends? Thanks.

are you talking about the cap? for example: 8gb is the max storage capacity for MS-DOS 6.22.

 

[gergguy]

Moondoggy may be referring to the 2 TB limit Windows has for an NTFS boot partition. I don't think you will have any problem at all with a 4 TB external drive.

 

[Moondoggy]

Yes, I was concerned about the 2 TB limit for NTFS. From what I gathered elsewhere this only pertained to older versions of Windows not Windows 10. Thanks to all that replied.