Back in 2002,
in order to verify that the drivers did indeed support files
as big as their design maximum,
the NTFS test team sat down,
created a volume slightly bigger than 16TB,
and then created a file of the maximum supported size,
filling it with a known pattern.
After the file was successfully created,
they then ran another program that read the entire file back into
memory and verified that the contents were correct.
(They ran other tests, too, of course, but those are the ones that
are important to this story.)
How long did it take to create this nearly-16TB file?
Around three days.
Verifying that the data was written correctly
took about four days.