Re: creating filesystem on huge disks in RHEL3

[Stephen Gardner <stephen-rhel uk org>]

> > On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 17:37 -0400, Viktor Hornak wrote:
> > 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?).

> On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>
> you first of all really want to use the U5 (beta) kernel and e2fsprogs,
> anything prior to that has some issues > 1Tb..

Viktor,
    I would also advise you to consider spending a little time getting to 
know LVM as you have (currently) an empty disk system to experiment with. 
I think I'm right in saying that LVM (indeed LVM2) is the way forwards in 
RHEL4 and the ability to grow volume groups and subsequently logical 
volumes and their associated file systems is particularly useful with 
these larger disk arrays. Not necessarily of utility now but a couple of 
hours getting to know the basic on a blank disk array could pay dividends 
at a later date. I recognise that spending time on a path you may not 
choose to go down can be difficult to justify.

Regards,
     Stephen

References:

The LVM HOWTO is very long but informative
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/

The Linux Gazette, Issue 84 article give a simpler, admittedly older but 
more readable introduction to the topic
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue84/vinayak.html