[CentOS] Speaking of 3Ware/RAID/SATA/9550SX...

[Mark Schoonover]

Yes, I did try to boot off a 4.5TB device. Now, the individual partitions
are:

/	1GB		/dev/sda2	ext3
/boot	250MB 		/dev/sda1	ext2 (Marked as primary partition.)
swap	1024		/dev/sda3	ext3
/data	4.449TB	/dev/sda4	ext3

All 9 drives are RAID5 together via the 3Ware card. Tomorrow, I'll don my
earplugs and create a small 1TB RAID device to install CentOS, then RAID5
the remaining 7 drives for all the data. I'l recreate the partitions above
in the 1TB array, then use LVM to add the remaining 3.5TB into the LVs I
need. I could also read up on array carving, that's new to me.

Thanks for all the help on this, I really thought I was doing something
silly with the BIOS or some other setting. Didn't realize I would be running
into limits of the OS.

Now, if anyone knows how to tune this thing for best write performance, that
would be really cool. This server is part of a tapeless backup system using
rsync. There's a good howto in the Linux Hacks book. We started from that,
and it's just grown into a fully automated system that does hourly, daily
and weekly backups. Plus, it sends it offsite to a colo location.... In case
people were wondering why so much disk space...

Mark