NTFS - Limitations

Limitations

The following are a few limitations of NTFS:

Compression
The compression algorithms in NTFS are designed to support cluster sizes of up to 4 kB. When the cluster size is greater than 4 kB on an NTFS volume, NTFS compression is not available.
Maximum cluster size
The maximum cluster size is 64 kB.
File names
File names are limited to 255 UTF-16 code points. Certain names are reserved in the volume root directory and cannot be used for files. These are $MFT, $MFTMirr, $LogFile, $Volume, $AttrDef, . (dot), $Bitmap, $Boot, $BadClus, $Secure, $Upcase, and $Extend. (dot) and $Extend are both directories; the others are files. The NT kernel limits full paths to 32,767 UTF-16 code points.
Maximum volume size
In theory, the maximum NTFS volume size is 264−1 clusters. However, the maximum NTFS volume size as implemented in Windows XP Professional is 232−1 clusters partly due to partition table limitations. For example, using 64 kB clusters, the maximum Windows XP NTFS volume size is 256 TBs minus 64 KBs. Using the default cluster size of 4 kB, the maximum NTFS volume size is 16 TB minus 4 kB. (Both of these are vastly higher than the 128 GB limit lifted in Windows XP SP1.) Because partition tables on master boot record (MBR) disks only support partition sizes up to 2 TB, dynamic or GPT volumes must be used to create NTFS volumes over 2 TB. Booting from a GPT volume to a Windows environment requires a system with UEFI and 64-bit support.
Maximum file size
As designed, the maximum NTFS file size is 16 EB (16 × 10246 bytes) minus 1 kB or 18,446,744,073,709,550,592 bytes. As implemented, the maximum NTFS file size is 16 TB minus 64 kB or 17,592,185,978,880 bytes. With Windows 8, the maximum NTFS file size is 256 TB minus 64 KB or 35,184,372,088,768 bytes.
Alternate data streams
Windows system calls may handle alternate data streams. Depending on the operating system, utility and remote file system, a file transfer might silently strip data streams. A safe way of copying or moving files is to use the BackupRead and BackupWrite system calls, which allow programs to enumerate streams, to verify whether each stream should be written to the destination volume and to knowingly skip unwanted streams.

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