Storage quota units change: TB to TiB

Following in Oak footsteps, we’re excited to announce that Sherlock is adopting a new unit of measure for file system quotas.

Starting today, we're transitioning from Terabytes (TB) to Tebibytes (TiB) for all storage allocations on Sherlock file systems. Users and groups will automatically benefit from expanded storage allocations, with no action required on their part.

$HOME will now hold 15 GiB of data (vs. 15 GB before)

$GROUP_HOME 1 TiB of data (vs. 1 TB before)

$SCRATCH will allow 100 TiB (vs. 100 TB before)

$GROUP_SCRATCH will allow 100 TiB (vs. 100 TB before)

The tech industry has adopted TiB as the standard unit of measure for data storage, and Sherlock is now aligning with those practices, which will provide all users with approximately 9.95% more usable storage capacity. It also ensures better compatibility with common Linux tools like df and du, which typically display disk usage in GiB/TiB by default. The Sherlock documentation will also continue to display units as TB, as is a standard practice among the industry.

Existing inode quotas on $SCRATCH and $GROUP_SCRATCH will not change, and each space will still allow storing 20 million inodes.

This change is being implemented automatically, and users will start enjoying the benefits of increased storage capacity immediately.

As usual, if you have any question or comment, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Research Computing at srcc-support@stanford.edu.