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I have an exFat drive (LaCie Fuel) that is 2 TB. On this drive I try to create a 127 GB VHD using Computer Management in Windows 7 but it fails with an error "The requested operation could not be completed due to a file system limitation.". Both VHD and exFat supports files that are significantly bigger than so. What is the problem? Any workarounds?
d-b
Posted 2019-12-08T21:01:33.390
Reputation: 392
Your issue could be related to sector size, as I believe exFAT uses 32KB or 64KB sectors by default. exFAT is intended for smaller size USB drives, not a 2TB HDD... I personally would recommend backing up the data on it and formatting it to NTFS with a 1024B allocation size [default is 4096B]. – JW0914 – 2019-12-09T05:41:53.123
@JW0914 Thank you for your input. It was LaCie that formatted it in exFat. It is one of those "WiFi-disks"/very basic NAS that also can be used directly via USB. – d-b – 2019-12-09T14:00:30.583
The only way to resolve your issue is to remove the HDD from it's casing, connect it to a PC, make a backup of all data, incl. the system files for the drive's software, then reformat the exFAT partition with the smallest possible sector size allowed (preferably 1024 at best, or at least 4096, but I'm not sure what the smallest sector size allowed is for exFAT). Once done, copy all the data back and reinstall the drive in it's casing. I'll never understand why large sector sizes are utilized on large storage drives because it's flat out inefficient (a 1KB file could take up 128KB of storage) – JW0914 – 2019-12-09T14:16:58.443