Chapter 3. Building an Enterprise Content Management Solution
One of SharePoint's core capabilities is to store document-based content. In many cases for informal team scoped documents, but organizations also typically have more formal enterprise content that is stored centrally and relevant to multiple groups. The Document Center template included in SharePoint 2010 offers a good starting point, but unfortunately it cannot scale to the size needed to support medium to large organizations.
The limitations are based on the overall amount of content; stored in a library, site collection, and underlying content database. At the time of writing, Microsoft introduced new guidance with the release of SharePoint 2010 Service Pack 1 which states that the maximum content database size can be 4 TB with SQL and storage sub-system optimization, or 200 GB without optimization.
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Additional details about SharePoint boundaries can be found in the TechNet article SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management...