It's indeed interesting that creating a VMFS-3 partition wipes the previously existing partition. Thanks for sharing this.
Anyway, some words for clarification about the different sizes:
- The 4TB HDD size is a marketing size, the real technical size of the HDD is 3.64TB (4,000,000,000,000 / 1024^4). The marketing guys calculate with 1,000 (base10) rather than 1,024 (base2).
- The maximum 2TB file size only shows up in the Windows based vSphere Client. As of ESXi 5.5 the maximum size of a single file (e.g. a virtual disk) on a datastore can be up to 62TB, but this is only supported using the vSphere Web Client.
André