From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Mar 5 14:49:19 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8F6F116A4CE for ; Sat, 5 Mar 2005 14:49:19 +0000 (GMT) Received: from rwcrmhc13.comcast.net (rwcrmhc13.comcast.net [204.127.198.39]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4BC1943D4C for ; Sat, 5 Mar 2005 14:49:19 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from emccoy@haystacks.org) Received: from [127.0.0.1] (c-24-98-109-41.atl.client2.attbi.com[24.98.109.41]) by comcast.net (rwcrmhc13) with ESMTP id <200503051449190150043ghve>; Sat, 5 Mar 2005 14:49:19 +0000 Message-ID: <4229C6EE.5080305@haystacks.org> Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 09:49:18 -0500 From: Eric McCoy User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (Windows/20040913) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Potential dangers with big arrays X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 14:49:19 -0000 I'm planning to build a fairly large - somewhere from 1TB to 1.75TB in size - array behind a hardware RAID controller and put FreeBSD on it. But after being a good boy and Googling for information before laying out a couple grand, I discovered that FreeBSD might not have such great support for large filesystems. The last bit of useful information I found was from July 2004, so the situation might have changed since then and I figured I'd ask. What sort of problems can I expect to see? Aesthetic problems, like negative numbers in df, are not a worry. The vast majority of files will be 1GB or smaller, so that's not a concern either. But the guy who did those tests in July got "no space left on device" after using up only 800GB or so, and that obviously would be a problem. Naturally I can, and will, test this myself when I get the hardware, but I'm concerned that there may be creeping invisible problems which might result in frequent panics or loss of data - problems which might not become apparent until after I've reached the point where I no longer have enough room to play musical chairs with my data (which will be about 400GB in). Any information anyone has, even if it's just a pointer to who or where I should be asking instead, will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.