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Date:      Sat, 15 Sep 2001 20:56:45 +0200
From:      Bernd Walter <ticso@mail.cicely.de>
To:        Matthew Jacob <mjacob@feral.com>
Cc:        Don Sullivan <sullivan@gaia.arc.nasa.gov>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Large disk (>1 TB) support in FBD4.3 ?
Message-ID:  <20010915205645.C17960@cicely20.cicely.de>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0109151125080.9267-100000@beppo>; from mjacob@feral.com on Sat, Sep 15, 2001 at 11:29:41AM -0700
References:  <Pine.GSO.4.40.0109151111110.1130-100000@durga.arc.nasa.gov> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0109151125080.9267-100000@beppo>

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On Sat, Sep 15, 2001 at 11:29:41AM -0700, Matthew Jacob wrote:
> 
> Don- too bad- I'm over in NAS in building N-258 and just took down the h/w
> where we could test this (Alpha 4100 with 8 Qlogic cards && 8 150GB MegaDrive
> RAID arrays)- We're excessing this equipment because the mass storage group's
> work was terminated due to budgetary goop.
> 
> Typically there's no problem in *recognizing* raw SCSI disk, or RAID units 
> that look like a SCSI disks- Mike or others will have to speak about how well
> specifical supported RAID cards for FreeBSD will handle something that large.

I'm not shure about recent SCSI definitions, but as long as a physical
sector is sized at 512 Bytes and SCSI uses 32Bit unsigned numbers a
(virtual) SCSI disk is limited to 2T.
Maybe recent SCSI specs already defined a new set of read/write...

> A more problematic issue is whether FFS can reliably handle > 1TB. We did some
> tests with NetBSD at 1TB a couple of years ago- you have to use larger block
> and frag sizes (we were using 32k/8k)- but I've never myelf gotten FreeBSD up
> above 500GB. I was going to do so when the rather flakey h/w I was on above
> was set to be excessed. If I'd known you needed the work done- I could have
> kept it going a couple more weeks and we could worked on sorting it out.

FFS in it's design can go up to 2G * fragsize - that means 2T with default
fragsize of 1k.
The Problem is that FreeBSD internaly uses 32bit signed Blocknumbers for
512Bytes/Block independend of it's physical size.
This limits to 1T.
I successfully build 600G partitions with vinum and I've heared of users
running partitions near the 1T limit.

-- 
B.Walter              COSMO-Project         http://www.cosmo-project.de
ticso@cicely.de         Usergroup           info@cosmo-project.de


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