NTFS Directory Depth limitation?

[warmflatsprite]

Hello,

I work for a small IT company that runs a CVS server on Windows XP that's formatted to NTFS. Since we started with this server configuration (about 6 months ago) it has corrupted four drives. At first we thought it was hardware issues, so we've swapped out drives and eventually the machine, but over the course of last weekend, it happened again. We're beginning to look into software issues. As far as I know, CVS doesn't do any low-level disk access, so that'd lead me to believe that there's some limitation in the interface between the OS and CVS that's causing our discs to crash. The first thing that comes to mind would be directory depth. The files in our repository go to a VERY deep directory structure, and there's over 22,000 files stored in the repository. Could this be the source of our frustrations? Is there anything else we should take a look at?

The corruption is bad enough that a full NTFS rollback was not possible, and each time we lost changes to our codebase. Needless to say, any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks,
Ben

 

[albybum]

The size of a storage area and number of entries in a directory
depends on the filesystem and operating system you are using.
If this is Windows NT 4 or later and you are using NTFS for
the filesystem there is effectively no limit on the number of
direct child folders in a directory. There is however a limit
on the total full pathname string size for file and folders, which
means there is a limit on nesting depth for folders, but this will
vary based on the name lengths for the folders in the path.

User Rights are machine-wide and do not vary based on this
and that particular folder. NTFS permissions for new objects
(files and folders) in a directory are taken from the parent
folder in which they are newly defined. These may not be
exactly the same as are on the parent, but they will be exactly
as the permission of the parent state that the child should have.

--
Roger Abell
Microsoft MVP (Windows Security)

http://www.windowsforumz.com/Security-Folder-Permission-ftopict545082.html

 

[Geffy]

are you using a dedicated machine to host the cvs server? an alternative if you cant get NTFS to host it stabley then try either Unix or Linux. I havent tried to run cvs on anything I have always used SVN which I run on FreeBSD servers.

how much space does the whole repository take up? how many files are there? what is the current deepest path? are you syncing this with other systems running on NTFS? does it corrupt right after a commit or update? during a commit or update? or just seemingly randomly during the night when no one is really using it?