• Although netCDF-3 supports extremely large files, non-record variables are limited in size to 4 GiB each
• In netCDF-3, each record slice of a record-variable is similarly limited in size, even on 64-bit platforms
• The HDF5 format used by netCDF-4 eliminates these size constraints

2007 Unidata NetCDF Workshop for Developers and Data Providers > Introduction to NetCDF-4