Date: Sat, 05 Mar 2005 09:49:18 -0500 From: Eric McCoy <emccoy@haystacks.org> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Potential dangers with big arrays Message-ID: <4229C6EE.5080305@haystacks.org>
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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.
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