[CentOS] Calling All FS Fanatics

> However, with large filesystems, you could be looking at a lengthy fsck
> process in the event of an unclean shutdown.  Some say it can take days
> on really large raid arrays, but fsck's on my 0.5 terabyte ext3 FS,
> which has a nearly identical on disk structure as ext2, takes 8 minutes.

Probably because they used e2fsprogs lower than version 1.35 or 
somewhere around that. Upgrading meant huge improvements in the time 
needed to do fsck.