Device Sizes

The nblocks property is exported by each slice of a block device drivers. It contains the number of 512 byte blocks that each slice of the device can support. The nblocks property is defined as a signed 32-bit quantity, which limits the maximum number of disk blocks to 1Tbyte.

Disk devices that provide more than 1Tbyte of storage per disk, must define the Nblocks property, which should still contain the number of 512 byte blocks that the device can support. However, Nblocks is a signed 64-bit quantity, which removes any practical limit on disk space.

The nblocks property is now deprecated; all disk devices should provide the Nblocks property.