Hey Guys, first post here so here goes!

I have a storage server (Dell NF500 III, with 6x750GB SATA Drives) which I am going to be setting up for our company off site backups (I have two to setup)

I am installing CentOS on them which I have been recommended however I am new to CentOS. The servers have 3.4TB (6x750GB on Raid 5) but I have the following partition issues:

/dev/sda1 mount point: / Size: 30GB
/dev/sda2 mount point: swap Size: 4GB
/dev/sda3 mount point: /home Size:1315.9GB

The problem here is /dev/sda3; I have 3315GB free but I cant seem to get it to partition larger than 1315GB? When in the CentOS installer, using the partition tool, I create /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda2 and then for /dev/sda3 I click the "use all free space" option or whatever it is (cant remember word for word) but it won't go any larger?

Has anyone got any ideas? It is a hardware raid if this makes a difference, would a software raid solve the issue, I have never used one before? Also, before CentOS I had Win2k3 (but I decided I wanted Linux on these machines) which also had the same problem. Windows was making a 2TB parition with 1.3TB left over or I could have a 1.3TB Parition with 2TB left over?

Could it be a hardware limit like on my raid controller, I don't know if such limitations exist, is that possible?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
r00tb00t

No, RAID has nothing to do with file system limitations, Software or Hardware based. Keep your hardware RAID, software RAID sucks.

What filesystem are you formatting this in? So when you're doing a custom disk layout, are you actually seeing a clean blank slate of drive space, no existing partitions leftover? Also, you may want to consider creating at least:

/boot
swap
LVM that includes a separate /, /usr, /var, /tmp and /home. Also, if this is for backups, might want to create a separate /backup or /storage directory and allocate most of the space to it, don't put it in home, home is for user home directories, nothing more and nothing less.

Be conservative too, / takes up literally zero amounts of space when you partition out /usr and /home from it. And with LVM, you can leave some empty unused space to grow partitions when needed or max it out and grow/decrease where needed when the time comes.

A possible good layout to start with:

/boot = 100MB
swap = Match Installed RAM Size
LVM
/ = 1024MB
/usr = 8196MB
/var = 4096
/tmp = 4096
/home = 4096
/backup = Remaining or a TB, you're call, I don't know how much you've got to backup to start with.

I'll give this a go in a while when I get my hands on that server again!
But do you think this will solve my problem, I can see where you are comming from with a much more organised layout however:

Thats why I wondered about software RAID, I understand that my RAID setup wont have an effect on the partition size however I wondered if perhaps CentOS cant make such large partitions because it can't interface with a hardware RAID like it could software RAID possibly?

Thanks for your help, its is greatly appreciated!

Regards,
r00tb00t