[CentOS] 64 bit hardware and filesystem size limit

[Chris Mauritz]

Cletus Murphy wrote:

>>>Don't use ext2 or ext3 as your fs.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>Why not?
>>    
>>

>>1. Because it will give you terrible gas.
>>    
>>

I see.  And all this time, I thought it was the Armagnac....

>2. I'm not going to open this up for a big FS thread but xfs/reiserfs
>performs much better on large partitions then ext2/3 in my humble
>experience - I also seem to remember that I could not create a
>partition larger then 4TB with ext3 on my system, though, I suffer
>from fetal alcohol syndrome so maybe I was doing something wrong.
>
>  
>

Performs better for what?  For my uses, mostly moving around 
uncompressed video, I don't seem to have any problems at all with ext3 
using either software RAID or 3Ware RAID cards.  As a matter of fact, I 
can state with a high degree of confidence that disk I/O hasn't been one 
of my bottlenecks to date.  I'm mostly waiting on cpu cycles for 
encoding/rendering.  I haven't needed to create a partition greater than 
4TB yet.  The biggest I've gone so far is a RAID0 software stripe of two 
3.2gig hardware RAID0 partitions.  These are for "scratch disks" for 
data that's relatively easy to reproduce so I don't bother with RAID 
3/4/5.  For data that's vitally important or hard to reproduce, I stash 
that on a RAID5 array (that gets backed up to a redundant RAID5 array).  
I suspect vanishingly few numbers of people have occasion to create 
partitions greater than 4tb.  Let's see, that's 10+ 400gig drives.   
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have petabytes of storage laying around, 
but the logistics of going over about 3TB per partition for most folks 
(at least with current hard drive sizes) are a bit out of reach.  When 
this problem comes even remotely close to biting me in the hiney, THEN 
I'll worry about it.  Until then, it's just a strawman.

Best regards,