two limits (called “soft” and “hard”) refer to the number of blocks consumed. If the filesystem was created with a block-size of 1 kibibyte, the 1024 available bytes of each block can only be assigned to one file. Unsaturated blocks thus induce losses of disk space. A quota of 100 blocks, which theoretically allows storage of 102,400 bytes, will, however, be saturated with just 100 files of 500 bytes each, only representing 50,000 bytes in total.

two limits (“soft” and “hard”) refer to the number of inodes used. Each file occupies at least one inode to store information about it (permissions, owner, timestamp of last access, etc.). It is thus a limit on the number of user files.