hard drive limits

[sonic67]

Was wanting to know if the linux distros have a hard drive size limit on them kinda like windows does or are they how ever big my motherboard and bios can handle. thanks for any help.


by the way as a newbie i really enjoy this site it has helped me alot in trying to understand linux by ether me searching the site or asking you all.. so great job and keep up the good work.

[jayd512]

Hi, sonic.

Modern Linux file systems do have limits on the size of volumes that you can have... but I think you're probably in little danger of hitting that limit.
The ext3 file system can have a maximum file size of 2 terabytes, and a volume size of 32 TB.
Ext4 can handle 16TB files. But a whopping 1 exabyte volume! That's a billion GB!!!


Other systems like XFS can hold up to 8 EB... so I think, as a home user, we're safe from hitting the limits.

[sonic67]

Ok cool. i know i definitely wont go to the max.. thanks for quick reply.

[Rubberman]

Yeah, the numbers get pretty big, quickly. Consider that an exabyte is about 1 million terabyte drives. I don't know anyone who uses that much data, yet. I know that at CERN and Fermi Lab their active data sets are in the multi-petabyte range (1 petabyte == 1 million gigabytes, or 1000 terabyte drives), and it is distributed over a world-wide high speed network among the major physics labs and research institutions. This network can transmit the data in about 100,000 full blu-ray discs per day. The links are currently running 186 gigabits per second. Here's a link to an article about the network: High-energy physicists set record for network data transfer

[robt23]

I`d just like to add that no one mentioned jfs files , do they also fall into the petabyte category. Had to plug a rocket card with sata inputs into a free pc-i express slot in order for my bios to rec my drive, 3 tb WD.

[Rubberman]

I`d just like to add that no one mentioned jfs files , do they also fall into the petabyte category. Had to plug a rocket card with sata inputs into a free pc-i express slot in order for my bios to rec my drive, 3 tb WD.

I thought about JFS - it is used on my embedded ARM Linux system, but since I didn't know what its specs are, I didn't mention it. Definitely a candidate. The only thing is that for many distributions of Linux, you will have to install the driver, and on some that means reconfiguring and building a custom kernel.