[CentOS] mkfs.ext3 on a 9TB volume

Mon Sep 12 16:02:25 UTC 2005
Chris Mauritz <chrism at imntv.com>

Francois Caen wrote:

>>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?
>
>  
>

Huh?  I suspect he did this not because of the OS, but because each RAID 
card had maxed out the number of physical ports.  You don't HAVE to do 
that.  I suspect it would also work fine if you had a dozen 500gb 
Hitachi drives on a 12-port 3ware card.

For what it's worth, I have also done RAID0 stripes of 2 raid arrays to 
get *really* fast read/write performance when used for storing 
uncompressed video.  Recently, when I was at Apple for a meeting, that 
was their engineer's preferred method for getting huge RAIDs....running 
software RAID volumes across multiple Xserve-RAID devices

Perhaps I'm just extremely lucky, but I've not run into this magic 1TB 
barrier that I see bandied about here.  Heck, if you're willing to roll 
the dice on Hitachi drives, you can get a terabyte these days with just 
2 hard disks in the array with RAID0 or 3 disks with RAID5. 

Unfortunately, a lot of the documentation and FAQs are quite out of date 
which can lead to some confusion.

Cheers,