Maximum SharePoint Content DB Capacity

Question

I have a SharePoint (WSS 3.0) site into which I am to migrate a about 65GB from a legacy system. The Current WSS_Content Database is at about 30GB. There is only one SiteCollection, and we would prefer staying at one due to customizations that would break. Under the Site Collection, there are about 1000 webs, the Webs are about typically 3 levels deep and contain 1-100 document libraries each. The Libraries typically have 3 levels of folders, with anywhere from 0-1000 documents. These Webs are primarily used for managing documents and many of the documents will have modified permissions to support some business needs.

Documentation states that 100GB of content is about the maximum. Other articles state that you can go much higher if the site is mostly documents and not there is not constant change to the documents.

Any thoughts especially based on experience are appreciated.

Answer 1

100GB is not the limit its actually a best practise. This post lists out few suggestions.

1. Limit the content database size to 100GB; use multiple content databases if necessary.
2. Create multiple data files and spread them across multiple disks; only create files in the primary filegroup.
3. The number of data files should be less than or equal to the number of core CPUs; count dual core processors as two CPUs; count each processor that supports hyper-threading as one CPU.
4. Create data files of equal size.
5. Consider using SQL Server backup and restore; the SharePoint built-in tools can only restore files to the backup location.