NTFS and ext4 have a 2^32 limit according to this table. The Reddit poster mentioned in the article [0] has 2 TB worth of space. I’m not sure if that’s decimal or binary TB, but if we assume binary, you get an average of 512 bytes per file, which is pretty reasonable (and on a real drive, you might be limited by sector size).

But even if you had a 20 TB hard drive, and you wanted a lot of files smaller than 5120 bytes, you can just create multiple partitions. Maybe a little inconvenient, but you can still use your drive to the fullest. Not so much with Google’s 5 million limit (for a 2 TB Google Drive, the minimum average file size is around 430 KB [2])

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/123fjx8/google_has_...

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%282%2F2%5E32%29+TiB+in...

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%282%2F5000000%29+TiB+i...

Sure, everything has some limit. But the lowest limit I see on that page is 2^32, which is just a touch higher than 5 million. (/s) And far more importantly, none of those filesystems just decided one day to reduce the limit, which is kind of a big deal. (Although funny, in a horrible way; imagine booting up your machine one day and it tells you that your home filesystem needs to drop a few million files before it can mount. Can you imagine?)

> none of those filesystems just decided one day to reduce the limit

Yes and no. This works differently from one filesystem to another, but search for "running out of inodes" to find many ways this can happen in reality, way below the technical limit of the filesystem itself. You can end up in situations where you can't create a new file and need to remove more than one to solve the situation. (Or even where removing many files doesn't seem to make a difference)

The thing about running out of inodes is that the format command scales them with the size of the drive, and the default is 1 inode per 16KB. So for a standard google account at 2TB or maybe 5TB you'd have 125 million or 312 million inodes.

They've basically gone and set it up like "largefile" mode, 1 inode per 1MB, forced upon all users. That's a bad default and an even worse mandate.