Thank you all for the help. I'm writing this summary message because of people requests. I haven't tried all of this. I just collected it and organized it.

You've got a big storage. Now what? The short answer is: "Just connect it. It should work."

I'll play safe by saying that the following applies to <10TB storage. Some people reported file systems of 80TB.

Things to watch out for: - Make sure the driver you are using or the storage itself don't restrict you from making big partitions or file systems. - fdisk creates partitions up to 2.1TB in size. Use "parted" instead. - RHEL5 supports up to 8TB ext3 file system. To create bigger then 8TB use option "-F" and 4K blocks.

Your options are: - If the storage is connected to a RAID controller you can use the controller to create smaller logical partitions. Then combine them with LVM.

- If you really want to partition the drive use parted. While partitioning if you run into this message: === sdb: very big device. try to use READ CAPACITY(16). SCSI device sdb: 10248519680 512-byte hdwr sectors (5247242 MB) sdb: Write Protect is off === you can just ignore it. It's informational (based on a few people replies). If you don't like parted you can still use fdisk to create a few 2TB partitions and then use LVM.

- Use LVM on the raw device. Don't partition. This is what I did and it worked for me. Make sure you wipe out the MBR first: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=512 count=63 (count=1 should work too but 63 won't hurt either)

Create the pv, vg and lv: pvcreate /dev/sdX vgcreate <vg name> /dev/sdX lvcreate -L <size> -n <name> -v vg_name

Now you have to create the file systems. Some people recommend XFS. If you try to create bigger then 8TB ext3 file system make sure you use option "-F" and 4K blocks: mkfs -t ext3 -F -b 4096 /dev/vg00/lvol01

For more information: http://www.centos.org/product.html http://kbase.redhat.com/faq/FAQ_103_11461.shtm The email thread "Disk partitions and LVM limits" in CentOS, RedHat and RedHat-Sysadmin mailing lists.

Thank you Peter

Hi,

I've got a DAS DELL MD1000 with a bunch of SATA drives in RAID 5 configuration with total space of 5.4TB. This box is attached to a CentOS5 system (kernel 2.6.18-53.1.6.el5).

Any idea how to make this space usable? Is there a limit how big a partition can be? What is the work around? Is there a limit how big a file system ca be?

I've tried to partition it but no matter how bug partition I create fdisk spits out these messages on the console:

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sdb: very big device. try to use READ CAPACITY(16). SCSI device sdb: 10248519680 512-byte hdwr sectors (5247242 MB) sdb: Write Protect is off

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I decided to not partition the drive and use LVM but the physical volume stopped at 2TB.

So, right now I can't use LVM because of this 2TB limit and I'm not sure if I partition the drive how good these partitions are because of the the message from fdisk.

Any help or idea is highly appreciated.

Thank you Peter