Creating multiple polygon grid in ArcGIS for Desktop?

Question

In ArcGIS 10.3 I'm able to create a polygon grid with "grid index feature" but the problem is that I would like create a very big polygon grid (the size like an entire continent) and with the cell size equal to a square with the side of about 250 metres. It's obvious that a normal computer is unable to manage this layer due to the big cell amount, we talk about billion cells!

My idea is to create "N" small polygon grid (always with a cell size about 250 metres) to cover my area and I don't want join attribute or other kind of operation. The problem is that when I create the first polygon grid, the second one needs to start (or to end) by overlap the last cell-line or cell-row of the precede polygon grid and so on.

I don't want an automatic process, I can manually create each polygon grid in ArcGIS but which are the steps to create this N polygon grid with this "special case"?

An image explain what I want, in this image there is only the North overlap but I need to consider also the case when the overlap in South or East or West):

Answer 1

Have a look at the Point to Raster tool. With this you can convert for example a point feature class to a Raster directly, and by specifying "COUNT" as Assignment Type, it will count the number of points that occur in each cell and store it as the cell value. So if your desired final output is a raster, this could probably be much faster than creating polygons.

You could test it with a larger cell size first to see if this suits your needs. If you have a lot of NoData values in the Raster, you can deal with it using tools like Raster Calculator, or Con.