Ext3 and rhel4

[Robert von Bismarck]

All,

After reading the thread about "huge" filesystems, and reading a bit on my own, there seems to be quite a bit of confusion as to what the max filesystem size of ext3 is.
Some say 8TB, some say 4TB other say 16TB and I don't have 16 1TB disks to do some tests :)

>From the ext3 FAQ (http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/FAQs/ext3-faq.html) :

> Q: What is the largest possible size of an ext3 filesystem and of files on ext3?
> 
> inspired by Andreas Dilger, suggested by Christian Kujau:
> 
> Ext3 can support files up to 1TB. With a 2.4 kernel the filesystem size is limited by the maximal block device size, which is 2TB. In 2.6 the maximum (32-bit CPU) limit is of block devices is 16TB, but ext3 supports only up to 4TB. 

>From Redhat's site (http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compare/)

>						rhel3	rhel4	rhel5
> Maximum filesize (Ext3)		2TB  	2TB  	2TB
> Maximum filesystem size (Ext3) 	2TB 	8TB 	8TB/16TB

>From the kernel docu Documentation/ext2.txt

> Filesystem block size:     1kB        2kB        4kB        8kB
> 
> File size limit:          16GB      256GB     2048GB     2048GB
> Filesystem size limit:  2047GB     8192GB    16384GB    32768GB

So, who is right ? By that I mean, has anyone already built a 8TB/16TB ext3 fs and was able to work with it correctly ?

Cheers,

Robert

Robert von Bismarck
Senior Systems Engineer


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