A cautionary side-note: when partitioning large file systems, be sure to 
use parted -- not fdisk, which has a 2 TB limit.

Cheers,
Andy

P.S. This giant table has a nice summary of FS features: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

On 07/15/2010 09:49 AM, Troy Dawson wrote:
> Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 06:31:48PM -0700, Isaac wrote:
>>> Well, ext3 will supposedly work with up to 16 TB in RHEL5, so SL should
>>> have similar limits.
>>>
>>
>>
>> I can confirm that at least a 7 TB ext3 filesystem is possible. I have
>> one 8x1TB RAID5 array running ext3 built with stock SL ext3 tools.
>>
>> I cannot confirm the 16 TB limit. Can you point us to a reference
>> somewhere?
>>
>> Here is my information:
>>
>> I looked into this several years ago when building an 11 TB
>> filesystem. The SL mke2fs
>> refused to make an ext3 filesystem that big and it turned out that
>> mke2fs sources
>> had a hardwired limit of 8 TB maximum filesystem size. Instead, I made
>> an 11 TB XFS
>> filesystem and it is still running just fine thank you very much.
>>
>>
>
> Here is the web page with the limits.
>
> http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compare/
>
> Don't worry about the subscriptions, and assume that S.L. is equivilant
> to AS or Advanced Platform.
>
> One thing to note is that this page get's updates after each update, so
> these number apply to SL 5.5. You might run into some lower limits if
> you are running SL 5.0.
> But if you are working with 1 to 2 Terabytes, you should be fine.
>
> My opinion.
> I use ext3 for everything, and I have several filesystems that are in
> the 2 Terabyte range.
> If doesn't depend on how big your file system is, it depends on what you
> are doing with it.
> Only use XFS on x86_64.
> If you are writing, reading, and deleting lots of small files (1000 -
> 10,000) all the time, XFS is the winner because it deletes much much
> faster.
> Other than those two comments about XFS, I'm not going to say anymore.
> As I said at the beginning, I use ext3 on everything with no complaints.
> I plan on using ext4 when I move to SL 6.
>
> Troy