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What could be Largest Size of a Folder and File on

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Hi,

I have Win XP (Home) as my OS.

I am trying to collect a large sum of Stock Market data like the prices of about 5000 different stocks.

Each stock’s data makes up one file and it is in .txt file format.

I have one hard drive with total of 5 Partitions, each 15 GB in size and formatted as Fat 32.

Currently I have a directory structure like this :

My Computer\ D: \ Stocks Data \ Group 1 \ Data file

I would like to preferably put all 5000 stock’s data in the above “Stocks Data” folder but I am not sure as to

(1) How Large Data file I can have in terms of MBs in folder Named “Group 1” ?

(2) How many MBs of data can I put in a single folder Named “Stocks Data” and also in the folder Named “Group 1” ?

In other words I need to know the Largest file size and Largest folder Size Windows XP would allow in Partition ?

Also putting a large amount of data in a single file or folder cause any problems and if yes what kind of problems?

Thank You,
Greg

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1. Largest size should be 15GB.
2. The limit any one folder can have is the actual remaining unused capacity of the partition. C: itself is one folder/directory. Every folder within C: is a subdirectory. So, the maximum capacity of the C: (folder) is the size of the entire drive or the partition size you have specified for it. To be more specific to your question, the text file cannot exceed the size of the drive, and it is highly unlikely that you will have a .txt file that even comes close to that (15GB). So, you should be in good shape.

When the partition gets close to being full, you can use your copy of PartitionMagic to resize the other partitions to allocate more space for your stock data.

Reply to TheCh0s3n1

To answer to last question in your post...

I've never tried to max out a .txt file, but I've never seen one bigger than 20kb, personally. Since I didn't know the real answer to this, I Googled it. Here's what I found: <A HREF="http://www.hotkey.net.au/~hambar/habit/compare.htm" target="_new">Text File Handling</A>. Scroll down to the section titled, "Text File Handling." Your answer is 2GB (in WinXP Home). Now THAT is a BIG .txt file! If you exceed the 2GB limit, I think Notepad will allow this, but it may not be able to save all the data. According to the site, Notepad will attempt to display all the data. This is true in Win9x and XP. In 9x, if the file size > the max size, Notepad will offer to open the file in Wordpad. This is probably the case in XP as well. With this in mind, it looks like you can exceed the file size limit without a problem since the OS basically hands off the large file to a program that can handle it.Edited by thech0s3n1 on 05/10/05 10:53 PM.

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