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Date:      Thu, 16 Jan 2003 23:51:18 -0800
From:      David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>
To:        Jason Schoonover <jason_jks@yahoo.com>
Cc:        freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: large filesystem, journaling filesystem support
Message-ID:  <20030117075118.GA3493@HAL9000.homeunix.com>
In-Reply-To: <20030114192634.75751.qmail@web13505.mail.yahoo.com>
References:  <20030114192634.75751.qmail@web13505.mail.yahoo.com>

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Thus spake Jason Schoonover <jason_jks@yahoo.com>:
> I have two questions really regarding an NFS server
> with a large filesystem.  Right now I'm using FreeBSD
> 4.7-RELEASE as an NFS server.  I used the ccd tool to
> create a software RAID, but need more disk space, so I
>  ordered a hardware RAID unit that will have about 1TB
> for disk storage.
> 
> My question is, are there any file systems that
> freebsd supports that is stable and can support over a
> TB of data?  Also, I'm wondering if there are any
> journaling filesystems out there for FreeBSD.  I know
> Linux has a few, and I'm wondering if freebsd will
> support any of those (ReiserFS, ext3, or JFS)?  I
> don't want to switch to Linux because NFS under linux
> doesn't seem to be near as good as it is with FreeBSD.
>  And if it wasn't a journaling file systems, seems
> that, in the event of a crash that fscking it would
> take forever.

FreeBSD uses softupdates, which achieves similar efficiency and
reliability goals to journaling.  With softupdates, you don't need
to fsck at all at boot time following a power failure or crash
because the worst case scenario (hardware failure aside) is that
some disk space that is really free is marked as allocated.  In
FreeBSD 5.0, you can actually run fsck in the background at any
time to reclaim this space.  That said, there is some limited
interest in porting a journaling filesystem to FreeBSD.  Several
people have started, but I don't know if anyone has finished.

A plain old UFS filesystem can be 1 TB in size.  Sizes up to 4 TB
could work, but you might have trouble with anything bigger than 1
TB in FreeBSD 4.X.  UFS2 (supported by FreeBSD 5.0) will allow you
to create filesystems much larger than 1 TB.  If you're
conservative, however, you might want to wait and observe others'
experiences with 5.0 before you use it on an important machine.

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