RE: 2.5.28 and partitions

Anton Altaparmakov
2002-07-25T12:57:00Z

At 12:44 25/07/02, Alexander Viro wrote:
>Al, still thinking that anybody who does mkfs.<whatever> on a multi-Tb
>device should seek professional help of the kind they don't give on l-k...

Why? What is wrong with large devices/file systems? Why do we have to break
up everything into multiple devices? Just because the kernel is "too lazy"
to implement support for large devices? Nobody cares if 64bit code is
10-20% slower than 32bit code on a storage server. The storage devices are
physically way slower than the system, so the data throughput would not be
affected in the slightest. We would just see a higher CPU load on the
database server and we can live with that. At least our applications deal
with GiBs of data for each experiment, which is shifted over Gigabit
ethernet to/from a SQL database backend stored on a huge RAID array, so we
are completely i/o bound.

It's one database, and it's huge. And it's going to get bigger as people do
more experiments. We need mkfs.<whatever> on a huge device... We are just
lucky that our current RAID array is under 2TiB se we haven't hit the
"magic" barrier quite yet. But at 1.4TiB we are not far off...

Best regards,

Anton

--
"I've not lost my mind. It's backed up on tape somewhere." - Unknown
--
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cantab.net> (replace at with @)
Linux NTFS Maintainer / IRC: #ntfs on irc.openprojects.net
WWW: http://linux-ntfs.sf.net/ & http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/