what max size of ext3 file system support ?

[richeal75]

I have a Lun with 1.6T , and I spent 4 hours to mkfs -t ext3 /dev/cciss/c0d1p1.

after that , mount /dev/cciss/c0d1p1 /share

but it failure , it report error"bad superblock" , so i want to know if ext3 can support 1.6T size filesystem , how can I resolve the problem ?

thanks for your help in advance.

[Stuart Browne]

'ext2' (or 'ext3') should support quite happily up to 2TB filesystems.

It should be reasonably quick making a filesystem on a disk (you know, I'd expect 100GB filesystem to be made within 2-3 minutes). How far away is this disk enclosure?

We're talking within a meter or so on the other end of a SCSI cable, right?

If so, then there's definitely something weird going on with the IO.

Also, given the size of the filesystem, might it not be an idea to use larger bytes-per-inode sizes ? Using 4K-bytes-per-inode on a filesystem that large would be, well, insane! But I guess it depends on whether you're using large-files, or many-many-little-files.

Could you please post the entire attempt in here, so we can see a bit more detail of the error. If you've lost it, try it again over-night, and turn on verbose output (mke2fs -v -j /dev/cciss/c0d0p0).

[Ivan Ferreira]

You should partition the device smallers units for two reasons:

1 - Create and verify the filesystem would take too much time (a complete fsck).
2 - If the filesystem is damaged, you will need to restore 1.6TB of information, and this could take too much time. If you create filesystems of 500 GB each, if the filesystem is damaged, restoring these filesystems will be faster.