On Wed, 19 Nov 2008, 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.

We recently upgraded one of our external RAID boxes from 3TB to 10TB, 
and are wondering much the same thing.

ext3 filesystems are supported on SL5.2, even if mke2fs won't create the 
filesystem without being forced with the -F flag. I still have concerns 
about performance and recovery though which makes me want to look at 
XFS. The 10TB ext3 filesystem has been stable during a week or so of 
casual testing, although the time required by fsck is reaching close to 
6 hours (with 7TB data on the fs).

Our server is running i386 though could be reinstalled as X86_64 (which 
I believe is required for stable XFS).

Graham
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Graham Allan - I.T. Manager - [log in to unmask] - (612) 624-5040
School of Physics and Astronomy - University of Minnesota
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