Limitation on characters for drive name?

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

My OS is Windows 10.

I just purchased an 8 TB My Book drive to add to my three 4 TB external drives (all My Book).

My existing drives all have titles with at least 28 characters in them; I changed the name when I purchased them using Windows10 Disk Management - also changed the drive letter at the time and all has worked well.

My new My Book drive will not allow me to enter more than 12 characters for the drive name.

I have tried changing the drive name using Properties and also Disk Management.

Is there a new limitation on the number of characters which can be used to name a drive?

Thanks,

Dave

Dave.

2

What filesystem is your new My Book formatted as? NTFS or exFAT.

If it’s exFAT, which I believe is the factory shipped filesystem, then you’re likely being limited to 12 characters, where NTFS can support more.

Try formatting (or reformatting) your new My Book through Windows Explorer or Disk Management as NTFS and see if you can exceed the 12 character limit. NOTE: All existing data on the drive will be erased!

3

Thank you so much. I reformatted as NTFS … and It worked! Now have a drive name consistent with the others.

Dave.

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