[CentOS] mkfs.ext3 on a 9TB volume

[Nick Bryant]

> On Mon, 12 Sep 2005 at 8:42am, Francois Caen wrote
> 
> > On 9/12/05, Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 at duke.edu> wrote:
> > > As I mentioned, I'm running centos-4, which, as we all know, is based
> off
> > > RHEL 4.  If you go to <http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/features/>,
> > > they explicitly state that they support ext3 FSs up to 8TB.
> >
> > Wow! Odd! RH says 8TB but ext3 FAQ says 4TB.
> 
> I wouldn't call it that odd.  RH patches their kernels to a fair extent,
> both for stability and features.
> 
> > >From my personal testing on CentOS 4.1, you can't go over 4TB without
> kludging.
> >
> > > I then did a software RAIDO across them, and finally:
> > >
> > > mke2fs -b 4096 -j -m 0 -R stride=1024 -T largefile4 /dev/md0
> >
> > Joshua, thanks for the reply on this.
> > There's something kludgy about having to do softraid across 2
> > partitions before formatting. It adds a layer of complexity and
> > reduces reliability. Is that the trick RH recommended to go up to 8TB?
> 
> Err, it's not a kludge and it's not a trick.  Those 2 "disks" are hardware
> RAID5 arrays from 2 12 port 3ware 9500 cards.  I like 3ware's hardware
> RAID, and those are the biggest (in terms of ports) cards 3ware makes.
> So, I hook 12 disks up to each card, and the OS sees those as 2 SCSI
> disks.  I then do the software RAID to get 1) speed and 2) one partition
> to present to the users.  Folks (myself included) have been doing this for
> years.
> 
> The one gotcha in this setup (other than not being able to boot from the
> big RAID5 arrays, since each is >2TiB) is that the version of mdadm
> shipped with RHEL4 does not support array members bigger than 2TiB.  I had
> to upgrade to an upstream release to get that support.

Just out of interest, and to complicate the matter even more, does anyone
know what the upper limit of GFS is?