creating filesystem on huge disks in RHEL3

[Viktor Hornak <hornak csb sunysb edu>]

Hi,

I was wondering if someone could advice on how to create an (ext3) 
filesystem on a huge disk (by current measures). The disk is actually a 
hardware RAID, so it presents itself as /dev/sdb and is about 1.4TB big. 
I created one big partition (/dev/sdb1) with fdisk and was trying to 
create an ext3 filesystem afterwards (simply running mkfs.ext3 
/dev/sdb1). The problem is that after a while, the "Writing inode 
tables: ..." slowed down to a crawl and now it's about 0.8% (!) through 
with inode creation and has been running for about 4 hours. It looks 
like this is not the way to go. Is ext3 not scaling well for such big 
partitions? Should I use a different filesystem? Or should I specify 
some switches for mkfs.ext3? Also, maybe this is not how one should go 
about it - maybe I need to create several partitions and merge them 
somehow (LVM?).
Any help appreciated!

Thanks,
-Viktor
--
Viktor Hornak
SUNY at Stony Brook