I dont have experience with filesystems that large but I have used xfs for 
about 3 years now.  I've not encountered any problems with them so I can't 
say how beastly they are to deal with in the event of problems.  Originally, 
I built the xfs module for SL4x but when I upgraded, I switched to CentOS 5 
which has the xfs stuff prebuilt.



Miles O'Neal wrote:
> Our local vendor built us a Supermicro/Adaptec
> system with 16x1TB SATA drives.  We have a 12TB
> partition that they built as EXT2.  When I tried
> to add journaling, it took forever, and then the
> system locked up.  On reboot, the FS was still
> EXT2, and takes hours (even empty) to fsck.  Based
> on the messages flying by I am also not confident
> fsck rally understands a filesystem this large.
> 
> Is the XFS module stable on 5.1 and 5.2?  (The
> vendor installed 5.1 because that's what they
> have, but I ran "yum update").
> 
> Anyone have experience with filesystems this large
> on a Linux system?  Will XFS work well for this?
> 
> If any of you have successfully used EXT3 on a
> filesystem this large, are there any tuning tips
> you recommend?  I was thinking of turning on
> dir_index, but somewhere I saw a warning this
> nmight not work with other OSes.  Since we do have
> some Windows and Mac users accessing things via
> SMB, I wasn't sure that was safe. either.
> 
> This is a 64bit system. 8^)
> 
> Thanks,
> Miles