Maximum number of Files in a Directory

Different file systems in different Operating Systems has different limitations in the number of files that can be in a directory as determined by the underlying architecture.. Here is an overview of maximum of number of files that you can have in a directory and associated problems, if any, like performance.

FAT32

• Maximum number of files: 268,173,300
• Maximum number of files per directory: 2¹⁶ – 1 (65,535)
• Maximum file size: 2 GiB – 1 without LFS, 4 GiB – 1 with

NTFS

• Maximum number of files: 2³² – 1 (4,294,967,295)
• Maximum file size
  • Implementation: 2⁴⁴ – 2⁶ bytes (16 TiB – 64 KiB)
  • Theoretical: 2⁶⁴ – 2⁶ bytes (16 EiB – 64 KiB)
• Maximum volume size
  • Implementation: 2³² – 1 clusters (256 TiB – 64 KiB)
  • Theoretical: 2⁶⁴ – 1 clusters

ext2

• Maximum number of files: 10¹⁸
• Maximum number of files per directory: ~1.3 × 10²⁰ (performance issues past 10,000)
• Maximum file size
  • 16 GiB (block size of 1 KiB)
  • 256 GiB (block size of 2 KiB)
  • 2 TiB (block size of 4 KiB)
  • 2 TiB (block size of 8 KiB)
• Maximum volume size
  • 4 TiB (block size of 1 KiB)
  • 8 TiB (block size of 2 KiB)
  • 16 TiB (block size of 4 KiB)
  • 32 TiB (block size of 8 KiB)

ext3

• Maximum number of files: minimum (volume Size / 2¹³, number of Blocks)
• Maximum file size: same as ext2
• Maximum volume size: same as ext2

ext4

• Maximum number of files: 2³² – 1 (4,294,967,295)
• Maximum number of files per directory: unlimited
• Maximum file size: 2⁴⁴ – 1 bytes (16 TiB – 1)
• Maximum volume size: 2⁴⁸ – 1 bytes (256 TiB – 1)