The SharePoint Content Database Data Size Limit
With the release of SharePoint 2010 SP1 and some new guidance we are changing the supported data size limits for SharePoint content databases. Prior to SP1 the content database limit was 200 GB for collaboration and 1 TB for document archive. The content database size includes both metadata and BLOBs regardless of where the BLOBs are located and use of RBS does not bypass or increase these limits.
The new guidance for supported content database size details outlines specific guidance for SharePoint administrators as the data size grows. If this new guidance is followed SharePoint can support up to 4 TB of data in all usage scenarios and has no imposed size limit for document archive scenarios. The details are in the TechNet document SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: Software boundaries and limits and the primary changes are:
- For a SharePoint content database up to 200 GB there are no special requirements and this limit is included for consistency.
- For a SharePoint content database up to 4 TB you need to additionally plan for the following two requirements:
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Requires disk sub-system performance of 0.25 IOPS per GB, 2 IOPS per GB is recommended for optimal performance.
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Requires the customer to have plans for high availability, disaster recovery, future capacity, and performance testing.
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And you need to review additional considerations in the TechNet Boundaries and Limits article.
- For a SharePoint content database over 4TB specifically for a Document Archive scenario you are required to additionally plan for the following:
- SharePoint sites must be based on Document Center or Records Center site templates and must be an archive scenario where less than 5% of content is actively read from each month and less than 1% of content is actively written to.
- Do not use alerts, workflows, link fix-ups, or item level security on any SharePoint objects in the content database. Note: document archive content databases can be the recipient of documents as a result of Content Routing workflow.
- Other specific limits changes being made at the same time:
- A new limit of 60million items in any one SharePoint content database
- The specific 5 TB limit per SQL Server instance has been removed. Instead you should work with a SQL Server professional to plan for database storage.