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I am considering partitioning a rather large hard drive with the UDF filesystem for an experiment, and would like to ask if anyone knows the maximum number of files, either by directory, or as a whole, that the UDF filesystem can handle?

For some background, I looked at the JFS and XFS filesystems (NTFS has a limitation of the number of files per volume); however, since I run Windows, that's kind of out. UFD, on the other hand, does not appear to have these limitations, but then, I cannot really find any information on just how many files per volume the UDF file system supports.

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up vote 2 down vote accepted

I haven't been able to find a concrete answer to this question either. From what I can gather, there is probably some way to calculate it, and this is my best guess. Hopefully this helps some.

512 byte block sizes allow for a 2TB partition, which would give you an optimal amount of 4,294,967,296 files assuming no overhead. Larger partitons require larger block sizes, so the number seems to be the same regardless of partition size.


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Hmm. The same amount as NTFS. Could you recommend a FS that is only limited by space, not the implementation? –  user978122 Nov 19 '11 at 5:13
exFAT can support up to 2,796,202 files per directory, but I don't know if there are any limits on the number of directories. Since it sounds like you are limited to windows for this, the available pool of choices is pretty small. If you had a machine that could use the ZFS file system it supports 2^48 files. –  Melikoth Nov 21 '11 at 5:30
Fair enough. I will look into exFAT then. –  user978122 Nov 21 '11 at 6:58
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