Shared folders (or hard disks): any "size limit"?

[science2002]

Before trying and risking disasters, it is better to ask.
Guest OS: WinXP SP3 32bit
Host OS: Win10 64bit

With WinXP (and I guess with any 32bit OS) there is the size limit of 2TB for any hard disk attached to it, included those connected via USB.
In the Host OS I have an external USB HDD (NTFS formatted) of 8TB and a folder (with its subfolders) called "MyFiles" that is already above 2TB.

Question: Given its size (or the size of its hard disk), is there any risk or issue in connecting that folder "MyFiles" as Shared folder in VB so that can be accessed by the guest WinXP? Or is it totally safe?

Thanks

[mpack]

With WinXP (and I guess with any 32bit OS) there is the size limit of 2TB for any hard disk attached to it, included those connected via USB.

In fact it's a limit of the legacy MBR BIOS, so it has nothing to do with the bittedness of the OS you install or the processor. For example Windows 10 is available in 32bit form and does support GPT (the partition format typically used by a UEFI BIOS).

It's important to understand that a "shared folder" is a software protocol, it isn't hardware and hence there are no hardware limitations, and the share needn't even relate to a disk at all. Do you expect your PC to care about the size of a disk in some cloud storage system? It's exactly the same thing. I guess it's possible that some really ancient OS would have no ability to express large file sizes, but they wouldn't have the ability to access that kind of share either.

And incidentally, the NTFS filesystem used in XP is pretty much identical to that still used by Windows 11, so it supports files and partitions in the exabyte range. This is to highlight my comment that drive sizes are mostly a limitation of the BIOS, not of the OS. The only relevant limitation in XP is that it predates the UEFI standard, so it doesn't recognize GPT partition maps natively. It's likely that drivers could be written to fix that, but of course booting from that drive would require BIOS support.

p.s. Pedantic note. The actual limit in MBR is a limit on the number of disk sectors, because the MBR uses 32bit fields to express partition offsets (LBAs). If sectors are 512 byte then the max disk size is 512*2^32 which is 2TB approx. There was a short transition period where mfrs made disks using 4K sectors (instead of the usual 512 byte), which increases the limit to 8TB, but that approach has a lot of problems, mainly that it's been 512 bytes since the 1980s so the assumption is deeply ingrained in a lot of software.

[science2002]

Thanks @mpack for the answer.
So, if I understood it correctly, if not totally, I should be reasonably safe in using it. And by "using" I mean both read-write use.

[mpack]

As I said, a shared folder is software, not hardware, so none of the discussions about MBR/GPT, disk sizes or filesystems apply to it. There is very little concept of size in a shared folder.