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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

Your analysis of why this limit exists is probably correct.

However, when you're paying for a product, the limits should be disclaimed. If I'm investing in Google Drive, I should be able to easily see the limits which apply to the product I've bought; that means total storage caps, file count caps, bandwidth caps, and whatever else.

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While I agree with you that restrictions should be clear, this feels like a limit well beyond what anyone would encounter. Even abnormal usage with something like many big git repos with tons of little nested files inside the data directory isn’t going to hit 5M files unless you’re really committed to pushing until you find the invisible wall.

It would be pointless if your car came with a giant list of the melting point of every material used in the structure of your car so you know what the “real” temperature limits are. Oh boy, better not let the car get to 1450C or else the steel frame might melt!

Whats the use case for car getting to 1450C ?

There isn’t one, comparing that to storing 5M individual files in consumer cloud storage platform which is also probably missing a use case.

I store way more than 5M files on consumer storage devices all the time. It truly isn't a ridiculous number, with 2TB it's not even hard to hit with a mix of text files and smaller media files.

If the storage vendor doesn't want people to use their product for the many use-cases where you end up with a bunch of small files, advertise the file count cap. Simple as that.

But the number of files you're allowed to store is a pretty basic feature. You know cars are made of materials which will break down at 1450C. You have absolutely no way to know whether Google's file limit is 100k, 1M, 5M, 100M, 1T, or what. How are you supposed to know if Google Drive fits your use-case when they don't document their limits?

Many, many, parts of a car will break down well before 1450 C, and you don't know exactly when.

If they listed every configuration to this level of granularity, the doc would be huge and no one affected would even see it. So the easiest way would still be to just pay for a month, try to use it as intended, and if you hit a limit, try another product.

Few people would read the doc, but someone creating 5m files might.

That's a fair point. It looks like most limitations are documented, but I couldn't find a mention of the 5m file limit.

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