Can someone please reply with the max external hard drive size that you can add?
Or maybe a link to a source.
Thanks.
There should be no real limit. I’ve personally connected a 6TB drive and there is no reason why any drive even larger than that cannot be connected, as long as it’s formatted EXT4, exFAT or NTFS.
If the drive is always going to be connected to a system running linux (OSMC, raspbian, etc) then use EXT4. If you need to connect it to Windows also, use exFAT (as NTFS performs poorly on linux)
Don’t forget, if it’s a mechanical drive without it’s own power supply, you will likely need a powered USB hub to supply sufficient power. The pi is unlikely to be able to support such drives with USB alone.
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Yes, I thought about that just before @ActionA responded and was about to update my post: You will need self powered drives or a good quality powered hub.
I checked the limit for an EXT4 filesystem and it’s 1 exbibyte (EiB). You can google exFAT and NTFS to see what those limits are.
There are no hard drives sold today that come close to filesystem limits.
exFAT is 128PB (128,000 TB), and NTFS on Linux is 256TB (8PB on the latest Windows).
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It’s funny to be talking about drive space limitations. When I was in college, I was doing some programming on a Heathkit H19 with 2 5.25 floppies. The capacity of those drives was about 360Kb.
The program I was doing needed to do a lot of sorting and the 8Kb memory size was not enough to do what I needed. I was so excited then I convinced them to get me 2 8 inch floppies, each with a capacity of 1.5Mb. I was in heaven with 3Mb of space!!!
And now I have a NAS with 33TB…
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Christ and I thought I was old!
I do kinda remember the 5.25 floppys, and boy were they floppy…but I only really got into computers with my Amiga, which used the 3.5 inch 1.44MB slightly less floppy disks, put them anywhere near anything magnetic and that was all your data gone!
A project at my previous job had me transferring 2.5PB of data across the Internet to a backup/disaster site. Before that, I had never really dealt with much more than a few TB.
It really was a lot like taking everything you are used to at home and multiplying it by 1000.
I still have a few 5¼" floppies at home, but no drive anymore. I keep a 3½" USB drive around just in case.