EXT3 performance on Large (multi-TeraByte) RAID

[Luke Rosenthal]

On Thu, 13 May 2004, Andreas Dilger wrote:

> Are you using 2.4 or 2.6 kernels?  In the 2.4 kernel files are allocated
> evenly across all of the filesystem space.  However, for large
> filesystems this is not very effective.  In 2.6 kernels the Orlov
> allocator will keep

uh oh.  I've been lurking on this list for some time, trying to learn as
much about ext3 as possible.  This looks bad.  Can I ask for some advice?

Say I had a 45gb disk, with a 30gb ext3 partition at the end on which I
had some important stuff stored.  I remove all partitions on the disk,
create one large ext3 partition and begin filling the disk with data.  I
realise my mistake after about 8gb was written.  Is it too late to restore
about 300mb of JPG files from this disk?

Do writes happen sequentially, or are they scattered all over the place?
If they are scattered, would they have hosed the data completely or can
parts be recovered?

Luke.