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Windows XP lived thorough 6 GB (minimum requirement - 1.5 GB, but I don't recall seeing drives less than six gigs at the time) to 2 TB HDD's. That's literally a

Windows XP lived thorough 6 GB (minimum requirement - 1.5 GB, but I don't recall seeing drives less than six gigs at the time) to 2 TB HDD's. That's literally a 333x increase, which NTFS handled just fine. From min requirement it'd be a 1000x increase.

akira2501 2y ago
> That's literally a 333x increase Yet that's only going from 2^32 to 2^40.
jeroenhd 2y ago
Windows XP's default clustering (well, until SP2 at least) "only" allowed for 128GB disks. The cluster size was later increased. The 2TB limit was generally a limit for the BIOS code rather than an OS limit, as NTFS will happily scale beyond 2TB. Windows NT 4 already contained the code necessary to allow for up to 16 exabyte partitions (https://web.archive.org/web/20010208131204/http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q224/5/26.ASP https://web.archive.org/web/20010208131204/http://support.mi...), but the hardware it was running on probably didn't support anything bigger than a few terabytes. Sure, every text file takes up at least 2MB, but with an exabyte disk, you probably don't care about wasting sectors like that.
- paulmd 2y ago
  a system that can be scaled 333x or pushed into radically different allocation patterns by changing one or two constants seems like an odd choice for arguing that YAGNI and you shouldn't plan for anything beyond 10x/should plan for a system rearchitecture at that scale. That seems very much like a system that thought ahead and picked meaningful knobs to allow drastic changes in use-case to suit the situation.
kalleboo 2y ago
When XP came out, you already had 100 GB consumer drives on the market that it had to support out of the box, so that's where I'd put the design requirements "starting point". That makes it only one order of magnitude bigger, similar to the 10x.
- anthk 2y ago
  A year after the XP release, disks with 40GB and 60GB were pretty common. Ideally XP required 10GB-20GB for a casual usage.

akira2501 2y ago

> That's literally a 333x increase Yet that's only going from 2^32 to 2^40.

jeroenhd 2y ago

Windows XP's default clustering (well, until SP2 at least) "only" allowed for 128GB disks. The cluster size was later increased. The 2TB limit was generally a limit for the BIOS code rather than an OS limit, as NTFS will happily scale beyond 2TB. Windows NT 4 already contained the code necessary to allow for up to 16 exabyte partitions (https://web.archive.org/web/20010208131204/http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q224/5/26.ASP https://web.archive.org/web/20010208131204/http://support.mi...), but the hardware it was running on probably didn't support anything bigger than a few terabytes. Sure, every text file takes up at least 2MB, but with an exabyte disk, you probably don't care about wasting sectors like that.

paulmd 2y ago
a system that can be scaled 333x or pushed into radically different allocation patterns by changing one or two constants seems like an odd choice for arguing that YAGNI and you shouldn't plan for anything beyond 10x/should plan for a system rearchitecture at that scale. That seems very much like a system that thought ahead and picked meaningful knobs to allow drastic changes in use-case to suit the situation.

kalleboo 2y ago

When XP came out, you already had 100 GB consumer drives on the market that it had to support out of the box, so that's where I'd put the design requirements "starting point". That makes it only one order of magnitude bigger, similar to the 10x.

anthk 2y ago
A year after the XP release, disks with 40GB and 60GB were pretty common. Ideally XP required 10GB-20GB for a casual usage.