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DonaldResor-4073 asked TeemoTang-MSFT commented

WS2016 10TB HDD GPT hard drive formats with 20mb remaining?

I've formatted a new external drive installed in a USB3.0 enclosure for back-ups.

The HDD was setup using Diskpart as GPT. Upon formatting the disk there is 20Mb shown to be remaining as un-allocated, why is this?


Thank You

windows-serverwindows-server-2016
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TeemoTang-MSFT answered

I think you don’t need to worry about it…
Modern partitioning tools align on boundaries of 2048 sectors, which works out to 1MiB boundaries. More-or-less all of them align the start points, and some align the end points, too. End points may also be adjusted to handle size issues in the filesystem, which could result in sizes that are multiple of various values, depending on the filesystem and its settings.
Note that 20MB is puny by the standards of your 10TB external disk -- it's just 0.0001907%.
If you right-click the un-allocated part, what happen? Can you New single volume or extend other volume?
Look at this similar case.
Small bit of unallocated space which I cannot add to my partition
https://superuser.com/questions/642411/small-bit-of-unallocated-space-which-i-cannot-add-to-my-partition/1159596
Please note: Information posted in the given link is hosted by a third party. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy and effectiveness of information.


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DonaldResor-4073 answered TeemoTang-MSFT commented

The remaining 20mb can be formatted into an additional volume.

The Extend option is available, but I remember there was problem with doing this back during the Windows Home Server 2011 days?

Maybe it was the spanned volume feature which was found to be troublesome and therefore removed?

I suppose then that if I had bought a 14TB or 16TB drive the non-allocated amount of space would be larger?

I tried extending the volume, and then proceeded to set-up backups to this external drive. When it was finished the non-allocated 20MB reappeared.

I guess then when dealing with the way Windows Server 2016 handles external back-ups there is no other alternative.

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I agree with your suppose.
About the format issue on previous WHS, it should not be reappear, WS 2016 is more higher than WHS 2011.

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