On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 17:37 -0400, Viktor Hornak wrote:
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