lacie "big disk and rh 7.3 SOLVED

[Rick Stevens]

chuck lawrence wrote:
> chuck lawrence wrote:
> 
>> uhh, *you* sorted it out, sir.  you were exactly right about the 
>> inodes.  I had used mkfs w/default values before.  mke2fs -n told me I 
>> had ~6m inodes.  mke2fs -N 120000000 (12m) works just fine, so far.  
>> I'm at 60gb and writing.  it wasn't firewire at all.
>>
>> the freezing behavior just went away, even before I did this.  it may 
>> be something wildly erratic.  dunno.
> 
> 
> 
> I spoke too soon.  72gb in, and it froze again.  I'm going to try an 
> even larger number of inodes.  I wish I knew the right number.  anyone 
> got any scientific strategies?

Let's see:

	500 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 = 536,870,912,000 bytes
	536870912000 / 4096 (bytes/inode) = 131,072,000 inodes

So I'd try "mke2fs -j -N 132000000 /dev/sda1" and see if that'll do the
magic.

Keep in mind two things: any file (no matter how small) will occupy one
inode and at least one block on the drive, so you don't want the
bytes-per-inode a whole lot bigger than the block size of the drive in
order to squeeze as many files on there as you can (block size can be
shown by "sfdisk -l /dev/sda").

Most files average about 4-8k, so using a 4K inode size is fairly good
compromize and that's what mke2fs usually defaults to.  If you need to
squeeze every possible file entry on the beast, then you can change the
bytes-per-inode parameter ("-i bytes-per-inode") and adjust the inode
count accordingly.

	536870912000 / 1024 (bytes/inode) = 524,288,000 inodes

or "mke2fs -j -i 1024 -N 525000000 /dev/sda1".

> stay tuned...

I will.

>> thanks.  this isn't the first time you've made me look smart...
> 
> 
> and also not the first time I've made myself look foolish.  sigh.

We all gotta learn sometime.  I've just never used a 500GB direct-attach
drive (all my big storage is SAN or NAS) or I'd have done the math
for you before.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-  BASIC is the Computer Science version of `Scientific Creationism' -
----------------------------------------------------------------------