In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Maxim S. Shatskih wrote:
ext2/ext3 has a system of "features" which can be added

So, 4GB files for ext2 is one of these additional features? OK, thanks, will
know this.

*clean* EXT3 filesystems). IIRC NTFS has something not that
dissimilar...

NTFS is more like ReiserFS. From what I've read on ReiserFS design - it is just
plain remake based on the same ideas as NTFS - attribute streams, B-tree
directories, MFT etc.

NTFS just predates ReiserFS by around 10 years, which is a clear sign of
"substandard technologies used by MS" :-) The only competitors to NTFS that
time of 1993 were VMS's filesystem and Veritas's product for Solaris.

(It depends on block size but unpatched 2.4 and earlier has a hard
limit at 2TB

So, I'm not this wrong. 2TB limit was there very small time ago.

Well, the 2.6.0 was published in december 2003. I would not call 4 years
''very small time'', considering disk sizes in 2003.

There are, BTW, some more filesystems available under Linux and
they are basically all pretty compatible. For really large
filesystems you would probably not use ext2 anyways, but perhaps
XFS (which also has been available on Linux since around 2001).
XFS has a file size limit and filesystem limit of 8 exabytes.

Arno