10TB filesystem possible on Red Hat 4 EL System?

[Jim Nelson]

Sam Flory wrote:
> Jack Murgia wrote:
>>
>> Using fdisk will only create a 2TB partition, so I created a partition with
>> parted instead, but we can't put an ext3 filesystem onto it. Thought I would
>> try xfs, but RHN doesn't offer an xfsprogs package.
>>
>> Do we need to move to RH or CentOS 5 in order to have a 10TB array?
> 
> 
>   Ext3 can in theory work on a 10TB file system, but I've yet to meet
> people who are very happy with the results over a TB, or 2.  (Well yes
> there are some ext3 developers....) What is going wrong with your setup?
>  You are using GPT, and a 4K block size so it should in theory just take
> an insane amount of time to create the filesystem.  (A really really
> really long time.) 

I can speak on this from experience - a 1.5 TB ext3 filesystem took around an 
hour to build, on a relatively fast RAID array ( not a Dell, but a customer 
backup unit ).  XFS, on our internal backup system, took a very short period of 
time.

Just be aware that XFS can be grown, but not shrunk.