[CentOS] 11TB ext4 filesystem - filesystem alternatives?

Thu Sep 27 18:15:46 UTC 2012
Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us>

On 2012-09-27, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
>
> XFS is fairly memory intensive.    11TB file systems tend to mean 
> millions and millions of files.
>
> frankly, I wouldn't run this on CentOS 5.6, I would upgrade to CentOS 
> 6.latest and then I would use XFS....   support for EXT4 and XFS is 
> rather sketchy with the old kernel in 5.x (and why aren't you at 5.8 or 
> whatever is current in the 5 series anyways?!?)

I have a ~20TB XFS filesystem on CentOS 5.  Support for xfs in the
CentOS 5 kernels is now built-in, so you don't have to rely on the old
buggy XFS modules from centosplus.  (I have yet to xfs_repair this
filesystem; I did repair it back when it was ~12TB, and it ran fine.)

I have also run xfs_repair on a 17TB XFS filesystem on a machine with
about 4GB of memory.  It ran fine in less than one hour (~30m IIRC; that
filesystem is on CentOS 6).

I definitely agree that CentOS 6 is a better way to go, but XFS can be
done on CentOS 5 too.  Just make sure you are completely up to date.

For the OP, what are the fsck times currently like for your ext4
filesystem?  If they are already less than one hour, you may not see any
benefit from switching.

--keith

-- 
kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us