On Thu, 26 Jul 2007, Mark Stodola wrote:

>> Doesn't the 'standard' PC partition-table only allow access up to 2TB for
>> devices anyway?  I'd failed to spot that your total size ended up being
>> (just) over 2TB which probably causes all sorts of issues...
>
> I have a 6x500GB array on a 3ware9650SE running just fine as a single 
> volume (2.3TB).  The partition type is 'ee' (EFI GPT) according to 
> fdisk.  Although, fdisk is broken with this large of a volume.  Other 
> tools such as sfdisk can handle them no problem.  df handles it just 
> fine as well.  This is a debian 4 (etch) setup. You may need to 
> pre-partition the drive if the SL installer cannot handle it.

I did say 'standard' but lets not have a flame-war about it... :-)

> One difference with my setup is that I use a standalone 250GB drive for 
> the OS.  I've never liked the idea of booting from a raid, although I do 
> it standard for customers in a raid 1 configuration with 2x250GB drives 
> on SL 4.1.

Likewise, I dislike booting from raid objects (be they raid-cards or 
external raid boxes), because I have long memories of horrors of recovery 
when things went wrong - all probably way out of date now though :-)

>> On the boxes we have with larger raid setups, we are lucky enough that
>> they can all chop up the raidset into <2TB chunks which get presented to
>> the OS as seperate disks, which we can then join back together with LVM...
<snip-myself>
>
> This seems like an ugly hack.  One should not have to use LVM in 
> conjunction with hardware raid.

Back in (as recently as) 2005 this was the only game in town.  Anyway we 
want LVM anyway 'cos one RAID enclosure won't be big enough for some uses, 
and I like being able to just add more PVs and grow the LV/fs as we add 
disks...

> Greater than 2TB devices/volumes are well supported with any modern 
> kernel and should no longer be a problem.

Good to know, next time we get a new RAID box I'll not be *quite* so 
timid!  The next limit is apparently 16TB (on 32-bit boxes), though I 
guess there won't be many 32-bit servers which will hit that limit soon...

  -- Jon