linux Maximum On-Disk Sizes of the Filesystems

Maximum On-Disk Sizes of the Filesystems

Note Kernel Limitations:The table above describes limitations of the on-disk format. The following kernel limits exist:

• On 32-bit systems with Kernel 2.4.x: The size of a file and a block device is limited to 2 TiB. By using LVM several block devices can be combined enabling the handling of larger file systems.
• 64-bit systems: The sizes of a filesytem and of a file are limited by 2⁶³(8 EiB). But there might be hardware driver limits that do not allow to access such large devices.
• Kernel 2.6: For both 32-bit systems with option CONFIG_LBD set and for 64-bit systems: The size of a file system is limited to 2⁷³(far too much for today). On 32-bit systems (without CONFIG_LBD set) the size of a file is limited to 2 TiB. Note that not all filesystems and hardware drivers might handle such large filesystems.

Note in the above: 1024 Bytes = 1 KiB; 1024 KiB = 1 MiB; 1024 MiB = 1 GiB; 1024 GiB = 1 TiB; 1024 TiB = 1 PiB; 1024 PiB = 1 EiB (checkhttp://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html)

Maximum Number of Partitions

An IDE disk has 64 minors, one is used for the full disk and therefore 63 partitions are possible. A SCSI disk has 16 minors and therefore only 15 partitions maximal.