Large File Support

GDAL supports reading and writing large files (> 2GiB) if it is possible in your operating system. Notes about large file support on Linux available here: ​http://www.suse.de/~aj/linux_lfs.html . In short: if you have kernel 2.4.x and glibc 2.2.x you are in luck. Maximum file size depends on cluster size. For ext2 filesystem with 1 KiB clusters it is 16448 MiB, for ext2 with 4 KiB clusters it is 2048 GiB. Other filesystems can handle even larger files.

Information about large file support in Windows could be obtained at ​MSDN. In short, maximum file size at NTFS is limited by (2^{64 - 1) bytes, at FAT32 and FAT16 it is (2}32 - 1) bytes. So don't try create files larger than 4 GiB on FAT32. In some cases you will not get an error message during jumping over 4GiB barrier, but all your data will be lost. This is not a GDAL bug, this is Windows problem.