Maximum On-Disk Sizes of the Filesystems

Filesystem	File Size Limit	Filesystem Size Limit
ext2/ext3 with 1 KiB blocksize	16448 MiB (~ 16 GiB)	2048 GiB (= 2 TiB)
ext2/3 with 2 KiB blocksize	256 GiB	8192 GiB (= 8 TiB)
ext2/3 with 4 KiB blocksize	2048 GiB (= 2 TiB)	8192 GiB (= 8 TiB)
ext2/3 with 8 KiB blocksize (Systems with 8 KiB pages like Alpha only)	65568 GiB (~ 64 TiB)	32768 GiB (= 32 TiB)
ReiserFS 3.5	2 GiB	16384 GiB (= 16 TiB)
ReiserFS 3.6 (as in Linux 2.4)	1 EiB	16384 GiB (= 16 TiB)
XFS	8 EiB	8 EiB
JFS with 512 Bytes blocksize	8 EiB	512 TiB
JFS with 4KiB blocksize	8 EiB	4 PiB
NFSv2 (client side)	2 GiB	8 EiB
NFSv3 (client side)	8 EiB	8 EiB

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 (check http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html)