I keep several virtual ones on floppies :-). The maxiumum file size is not closely related to the maximum disk size. The maximum disk size is 1TB. It is a feature that the file size can be larger than the disk size.
The following example creates a file of size 8T-1 using a whole 32K of disk space (3 indirect blocks and 1 data block) on a small root partition. The dd command requires a dd that works with large files.
ttyv0:bde@alphplex:/tmp/q> cat foo df . dd if=/dev/zero of=z bs=1 seek=`echo 2^43 - 2 | bc` count=1 ls -l z du z df . ttyv0:bde@alphplex:/tmp/q> sh foo Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/sd0a 64479 27702 31619 47% / 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 1 bytes transferred in 0.000187 secs (5346 bytes/sec) -rw-r--r-- 1 bde bin 8796093022207 Sep 7 16:04 z 32 z Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/sd0a 64479 27734 31587 47% / ttyv0:bde@alphplex:/tmp/q> exit
Bruce Evans, September 1998