How much TB of data can be CUT and PASTE in same Drive or same partition

Question

How much TB of data can be CUT and PASTE in same Drive or same partition

Mohammad Ishmail 21

When i try to cut and past 20TB of data in same Drive i am getting error for reqire additional space of 9TB to conitune.

what is the maximum data size can be cut and past at a time please advice.

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Answer 1

I don't have 20TB to test with, but I tend to agree with @Gary Reynolds last comment. It should not (ultimately) require any additional space.

I have an NTFS formatted external drive where I copied 8GB of video's to a test folder. It took about 10 minutes to copy. I used the USB drive because it is slower than my SSD. Then I did a cut+paste of that folder to another folder and it was instantaneous.

One difference could be the number of files. I only had 8 files that I moved. If you have millions of files in that 20TB, then Windows will need to update the MFT and it's going to journal updates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USN_Journal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Journaling

So if your drive doesn't have much free space, then it would seem to point to the fact that the NTFS file system needs to duplicate the MFT entries before it can delete the source entries. I don't think that anyone is going to be able to tell you how much space that is going to take.

You can try running defrag.exe or contig.exe to see if you can optimize the MFT.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/contig

You may have to move subfolders one at a time if you can't free up enough space to do it in one move. Maybe a Powershell script.

Mohammad Ishmail 21 Reputation points

2022-06-02T06:32:36.17+00:00

Thanks for your comment i have tried moving 20TB data immediately after a restart then instantly it moved with in a second so dont cut and paste so i have tested and found that we can move data of any capacity this will work only after a restart and perfom immediately when the server is booted.

Thanks once again for all your replies and time.

Answer 2

Gary Reynolds 9,621

If you are cutting and pasting from one drive to another using Windows Explorer, the maximum size is defined by the free space on the target drive.

Gary.

Mohammad Ishmail 21 Reputation points

2022-05-30T11:38:50.447+00:00

Thanks for the reply.

For example if i am cutting and pasting 20TB of data from one drive to same drive location using windows explorer what should be the maximum free size on that drive
Gary Reynolds 9,621 Reputation points

2022-05-30T11:53:09.147+00:00

The minimum free space has to be more than 20TB to complete the duplication\copy of the data being copied.
Mohammad Ishmail 21 Reputation points

2022-05-31T06:52:41.057+00:00

My question was if I move 20TB data on same drive from one folder to another folder then how much free space is required to move (cut and Paste)
Gary Reynolds 9,621 Reputation points

2022-05-31T07:35:50.45+00:00

If it's on the same drive, and you cut and paste, them it shouldn't require any space additional, as the operation is a directory update and doesn't move the data.

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How much TB of data can be CUT and PASTE in same Drive or same partition

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