How to create a huge file system - 3-4TB?

[Andreas Dilger]

On Nov 09, 2006  12:14 +0530, Raghu Ni wrote:
> We have a server with about 6x750Gb SATA drives setup on a hardware RAID
> controller. We created hardware RAID 5 on these 6x750GB HDDs. The effective
> size after RAID 5 implementation is 3.4TB. This server we want to use it as
> a data backup server.
> 
> Here is the problem we are stuck with, when we use fdisk -l, we can see the
> drive specs and its size as 3.4TB. But when we want to create two different
> partitions of 1.7TB each, then we get the error "out of range" while
> specifying cylinders.
> 
> And if we go for one single partition of 3.4TB, mke2fs returns error when we
> format the partition for ext3 file system and after some specific duration
> it exits with a error "Inodes not found... " similar errors.

Don't use a partition at all.  Just make the filesystem directly on the whole
device (e.g. mke2fs /dev/sda).

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.