I'm coincidentally working on the first of a series of articles on SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online that I hope to post today, but Microsoft wrote in to note that a related announcement today about some nice changes to the product's data storage limits.
With the release of SharePoint 2010 SP1 and some new guidance we are changing the supported data size limits for SharePoint content databases. Prior to SP1 the content database limit was 200 GB for collaboration and 1 TB for document archive. The content database size includes both metadata and BLOBs regardless of where the BLOBs are located and use of RBS does not bypass or increase these limits.
The new guidance for supported content database size details outlines specific guidance for SharePoint administrators as the data size grows. If this new guidance is followed SharePoint can support up to 4 TB of data in all usage scenarios and has no imposed size limit for document archive scenarios.
Please review the full TechNet article SharePoint Server 2010 capacity management: Software boundaries and limits document.
Be sure to read the full post for more information, including a Q & A, and a bit of related information around new SharePoint support for the SQL Server FILESTREAM Remote BLOB Storage Provider.