Large repositories with only binary files

[Wietse Hagoort <ha...@dnaservices.com>]

Hello all,
 
I am investigating if Subversion can be used to manage CAD development.
I would like to use it for storage and versioning of SolidEdge CAD files.
This will all be binary files and SolidEdge does not have any merge/diff utilities.
 
There will be 4 repositories with in total about 35 GB of binary data.
This will grow with about 7-10 GB a year.
The people will always work in a LAN area, and will only commit 50-100 mb max on a day.
On an average day there will be about 50 commits.
The files in the repository will be max. 10 mb per file.
 
I know that a checkout will take long but that is not a problem.
My questions/problems are:
- can subversion/berkelydb handle this much data/files and has anyone done this?
- On the local disk, the disk usage will always be double the size of the repository, but how will the server do?
- As far as I can read will subversion still do the diff-ing on the server side so the files on the server will not be copied on each commit. Is that correct?
- Will clients like TortoiseSVN still be responsive, so explorer.exe won't hang whole day because of the amount of files?
 
I know that I cannot use the merge and client side diff utilities because of the binary files.
Are there things I should pay extra attention to?
 
Thanks in advance.
Wietse Hagoort.