Filipe Brandenburger wrote:
On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 8:18 AM, Bent Terp bent@nagstrup.dk wrote:
Interesting, I thought that XFS was fairly safe for use. What would you recommend for filesystems in the 50-500 terabyte range?
I would recommend you split it in several smaller (2-4TB) filesystems. Most applications would support this, and with some clever tactics you might overcome this in applications that do not support it directly.
Disadvantages of using one huge filesystem (independent of filesystem type):
- If it breaks, you lose *ALL* your data.
- If you need to check the filesystem (fsck), it will take ages.
- You cannot easily scale horizontally by moving some of the data to a
second machine.
- It's much harder to tell what is causing performance problems.
I never had any filesystem over 5TB in my life (and I've managed more than 100TB at one site), and these days my "sanity" limit is around 1TB per filesystem.
I'm currently using XFS in production (we have some SuSE machines just for the support of it), but I've had so many problems that would have been avoided if we weren't using XFS, that I'm seriously considering migrating them all to ext3. (Bonus points for getting rid of that SuSE trash and replacing them with some shiny CentOS 5 machines.)
Are these 64 bit machines?