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Re: File sizes



 The bios can affect the largest file you can store indirectly.  Think 
about if you have a raid array over 2TB. Can a standard bios handle 
this "drive"?  I ran into such a scenario recently... 


On 10/16/07, Matthew Gillen <[hidden email]> wrote: 
> Scott Ehrlich wrote: 
> > What is the maximum file size permitted by Linux? 
> > 
> > That is obviously a generic question - 
> > 
> > - There is likely a BIOS limitation 
> 
> The BIOS doesn't know anything about files or filesystems, so I doubt it. 
> Your controller may have 32 or 64 bit registers, but that would only affect 
> transfer speed.  So it shouldn't matter what your BIOS or hard-drive 
> hardware are. 
> 
> > - 32 vs 64 bit 
> 
> It certainly makes a difference whether you have a 64-bit-capable CPU and 
> kernel. 
> 
> > - How about EXT2 vs EXT3? 
> > 
> > I performed some googling, but I didn't find any obvious hits based on 
> > the above scenarios. 
> > 
> 
> There's a fun (and quick) way to test things yourself if you've got a 
> particular system you want to test out without waiting for 4+ TB of data to 
> actually be written to the disk.  You can create a huge file that doesn't 
> actually take much space (a sparse file). Basically you do this: 
>   dd if=/dev/zero of=big_file bs=1024 count=1 seek=1073741824 
> to get a 1.1TB file. 
> 
> If you do larger numbers, you'll eventually get messages like this: 
>  dd: truncating at 4171511627776 bytes in output file `big_file': File too 
> large 
> 
> That will tell you what the filesystem/kernel support as the max file size. 
> The ext2/3 developers used this trick to test 64-bit support: 
> http://osdir.com/ml/file-systems.ext2.devel/2005-06/msg00038.html
> 
> Have fun, 
> Matt 
> 
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