Volumes that are candidates for deduplication must conform to the following requirements:

• Must not be a system or boot volume. Deduplication is not supported on operating system volumes.

• Can be partitioned as a master boot record (MBR) or a GUID Partition Table (GPT), and must be formatted using the NTFS file system.

• Can reside on shared storage, such as storage that uses a Fibre Channel or an SAS array, or when an iSCSI SAN and Windows Failover Clustering is fully supported.

• Do not rely on Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs). You can access data if a deduplication-enabled volume is converted to a CSV, but you cannot continue to process files for deduplication.

• Do not rely on the Microsoft Resilient File System (ReFS).

• Can’t be larger than 64 TB in size.

• Must be exposed to the operating system as non-removable drives. Remotely-mapped drives are not supported.

  Note
  Files with extended attributes, encrypted files, files smaller than 32 KB, and reparse point files are not processed by deduplication.