From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Chris Allen Subject: Re: Large single raid and XFS or two small ones and EXT3? Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 20:58:10 +0100 Message-ID: <449AF652.1030209@cjx.com> References: <449AEB7C.6040108@cjx.com> <449AEE46.6050408@zytor.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <449AEE46.6050408@zytor.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids H. Peter Anvin wrote: > Gordon Henderson wrote: >> On Thu, 22 Jun 2006, Chris Allen wrote: >> >>> Dear All, >>> >>> I have a Linux storage server containing 16x750GB drives - so 12TB raw >>> space. >> >> Just one thing - Do you want to use RAID-5 or RAID-6 ? >> >> I just ask, as with that many drives (and that much data!) the >> possibilities of a 2nd drive failure is increasing, and personally, >> wherever I can, I take the hit these days, and have used RAID-6 for >> some time... drives are cheap, even the 750GB behemoths! >> >>> If I make them into a single RAID5 array, then it appears my only >>> choice for a filesystem is XFS - as EXT3 won't really handle >>> partitions >>> over 8TB. >> >> I can't help with this though - I didn't realise ext3 had such a >> limitation though! >> > > 16 TB (2^32 blocks) should be the right number. > It should be, but mkfs.ext3 won't let me create a filesystem bigger than 8TB. It appears that the only way round this is through kernel patches, and, as this is a production machine, I'd rather stick to mainstream releases and go for one of the above solutions.