Maximum practical Outlook 2003 .pst file size

[StandardGreen]

Pre 2003, there was a 2GB pst/ost file size limit. 2003 and beyond
have supposedly expanded that maximum .pst file size to 20GB (
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925 ). Can anyone give me their
experiences with large .pst files in the wild?

I've got a user with 10GBs of mail spread over about 7 .pst files. One
of the .pst files is over 2GB and could potentially be pushed up to
4GB in the near future. The user reports that Outlook will occasionaly
perform slowly and even freeze copmletely. I suspect that it's caused
(or at least exacerbated) by the .pst files being fragmented all over
the hard drive with no contiguous free space big enough to hold the
file in one chunk. That's obviously not a problem inherent to
large .pst files. Does anyone have experience with massive .pst files
and their ills?

TIA


StandardGreen
-@- gmail -dot- com

 

[neo [mvp outlook]]

I have never pushed a PST/OST past 1.8GB due to legacy compatibility.
However I will advise that you exclude PST/OST files from real-time
antivirus scanning. Other than that (and based on your other message),
Outlook 2007 has some performance issues. If your site/user hasn't applied
update http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933493, get it applied.

Outside of that, the only other thing that I can think of that might cause
performance issues is desktop search software that indexes Outlook items.