12TB formatting ext3 on RHEL 5

compengr · 07-20-2007, 07:13 AM

I am in the process bringing up a server with a 12TB arrary. But I can't seem to format the array ext3. According to RedHat's site, RHEL 5 will support 16TB, but I have yet to find a way to format the array. Has anyone ran into this issue (and found a solution)?

jharris · 07-20-2007, 07:34 AM

What errors are you getting? Is the array presented to the server as a single block device/LUN or are you using LVM etc to combine multiple devices?

cheers

Jamie

compengr · 07-20-2007, 08:29 AM

It shows up as a single device ... when I try to format the drive via mkfs.ext3, I get the following error ...

mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
mkfs.ext3: Filesystem too large. No more than 2**31-1 blocks
(8TB using a blocksize of 4k) are currently supported.
[root ~]# mkfs.ext3 -m 1 -b 8192 /dev/sdd1
Warning: blocksize 8192 not usable on most systems.
mke2fs 1.39 (29-May-2006)
mkfs.ext3: 8192-byte blocks too big for system (max 4096)

**Note: I tried block size of 8k since the error report stated the max blocks @ 4k produces an 8TB limit.

jharris · 07-20-2007, 08:58 AM

OK, this does't look like good news but it seems you're stuck with a 4TB limit due to your page size, have a read of this article. I would suggest you look at a different file system, perhaps ReiserFS or XFS. Or... Can you create say two 6TB filesystems instead in doing so working around the problem?

cheers

Jamie