[CentOS] mkfs.ext3 on a 9TB volume

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Sun, 2005-09-11 at 17:11 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Keep in mind when you say that, the downtime in question
> might be several days for a full fsck to run, depending
> more on the number of files than the size of the filesystem.

Is there some way you'all are formatting your Ext3 partitions that takes
so long?  I don't think has ever taken longer than 8 hours to fully fsck
my Ext3 partitions on a multi-TB server -- and typically I only have 1-2
filesystems that need a full fsck and I'm _never_ down more than 1-2
hours.

I'm wondering if it's becauase I'm typically using only 100GB (and
_never_ more than 1TB) Ext3 filesystems.  And I'm deploying 3Ware
hardware RAID-10 and, limitedly, RAID-5 on servers that have PCI-X
slots.  I often find _extremely_poorly_ designed servers are the
culprit, and not so much other issues.

So maybe this is one of those "best practices" discussions we should
have on another list?  I just have to shake my head when I hear people
talk about multi-day fsck runs.  I've _never_ had that happen.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith     b.j.smith at ieee.org     http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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