[NTLUG:Discuss] Which filesystem & partitioning for a 9Terabyte volume?

[Chris Cox]

On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 09:51 -0600, Richard wrote:
> OK.. so I have a situation where I'll be needing to setup a 9 terabyte 
> RAID-5 array to host filespace for some OSX/Mac files.  The last time I 
> did something similar I was unable to partition the 4.1T volume and 
> wound up using LVM  to create a ReiserFS on the device -- NOT PARTITION.

If using partitions... and the partitions themselves are over 2TB, you
will need to use GPT style partition tables.  Some systems will not
understand GPT tables and might not boot from them.  But in general,
for most people, there won't be any issue.

Since I deal with a lot of different equipment, I don't do the GPT
table thing.  Instead I used LVM and place the entire large drive
under LVM mgmt (pvcreate /dev/sdX).  Then you create volume groups
and logical volumes out of those groups to house the filesystem.
Reiserfs and XFS are the only filesystems that can be grown
in all cases online in a reasonable amount of time (if that matters).

> 
> The issue I've had doing it that way is that to the untrained person 
> there is all this unallocated space!  No partitions...just lots of 
> unallocated space!   Of course that's not true as one can put a 
> filesystem on /dev/sdb as easily as /dev/sdb1.
> 
> So what should I do now with eight 1.5TB drives and an 8-port 3ware 
> controller (and either Slackware 12.2 or OpenSuse 11.1)? 
> 

I'd use LVM.  I have 8 1TB's at home on a fibre SAN, and I use LVM
there.  My problem is that the Red Hat folks have messed around with
the dm stuff to the point that my vg's go inactive everytime I reboot...
which is frustrating.  Used to work fine.  Still works ok on my
SLES boxes (thankfully).  However, I fully expect to inherit the mess
in SLES 11... I need to get the rc going so I can file a bug report
soon.

(there's already a bug report that's been around FOREVER since openSUSE
11.0.... but sometimes when it's SLES ears perk up a bit)

See:
http://www.ntlug.org/Articles/LVM