Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : centos and large 20tb Raid Volumes

[jo2jo]

I figure this is a great place to ask this question as you guys deal with super servers all day..i really cant find a good answer to this on the web and my 2 admins have solutions to make it work but i wanted to know if there is something better (my admin is now doing a raid 0 of 3 x ~7TB volumes)

Im running centos 5.5 64bit and a rocket Raid 3530 Card 12 sata port.

I have 12 x 2TB drives for a large 20TB raid 6 volume (and a small 100gb boot raid 6 volume separate)

so the raid card is putting out 2 logical devices, one 100gb and one 20tb.

any idea or direction on using this 20tb device in centos? id like to have just one volume as we host videos and woudl like to have a single folder filled with videos (on our current 4tb server /home is on the 4tb raid 5 , i would like this on our new 20tb server).

thanks for the help!

[CGotzmann]

so what is your question? mount the 20TB logical device in centos and thats it...
if anything different, i would recommend spreading your files across multiple folders.
putting tons of files in 1 folder will cause workability issues

[Steven]

I am going to strongly suggest you don't use a single 20TB filesystem - that will take days to run a fsck on.

[tulix]

I wouldn't recommend to install CentOS. My recommendation would be to install Fedora with XFS. 64 bit Fedora with XFS file system doesn't have any problems with 20 TB (and larger) partitions.

You wouldn't need to run fsck either for XFS - so that problem will be gone too.

ext4 suppose to be good too, but I don't think CentOS supports that yet and it still is not as good as XFS - I haven't tried it with large volumes yet, and probably wouldn't need that anyway.

[jo2jo]

perfect guys this is just the discussion that needs to be had, ill have more answers when i talk with my admin in about 8 hours. i think more and more people will be encountering this issue (wanting alot of space in one volume). 3 TB drives are just around the corner..

[nwilkens]

CentOS and XFS sounds like a good fit. The xfsprogs and xfsdump packages can be found in the CentOS extras repository.

ext3 with a default block size (4k) will only allow for a 16TB filesystem.

[tulix]

If it helps - "my" largest single partition was 45TB, no problems again - just used Fedora with XFS. Tried JFS - not there yet )and probably never will ). EXT4 - may be later on?

[tulix]

Originally Posted by nwilkens

CentOS and XFS sounds like a good fit. The xfsprogs and xfsdump packages can be found in the CentOS extras repository.

ext3 with a default block size (4k) will only allow for a 16TB filesystem.

You can do that but then you will have to install custom kernel for CentOS, I believe. That would mean no kernel upgrades via yum.

[net]

Originally Posted by tulix

I wouldn't recommend to install CentOS. My recommendation would be to install Fedora with XFS. 64 bit Fedora with XFS file system doesn't have any problems with 20 TB (and larger) partitions.

You wouldn't need to run fsck either for XFS - so that problem will be gone too.

I do not recommend XFS. Although it is fast than ext3, it is not good when it comes to file recovery. You should be ready or pray that your server will not experience power loss.

ext3 is the safest way to use if you value your data.

You can just split the partition or use 16TB then use the rest for the 2nd partition.

Good luck!


Moved > Hosting Security and Technology .

[nwilkens]

Since RHEL 5.4 (and CentOS 5.4); XFS has been included in the kernel.

Note that XFS is not available for 32 bit platforms.

[tulix]

Originally Posted by nwilkens

Since RHEL 5.4 (and CentOS 5.4); XFS has been included in the kernel.

Note that XFS is not available for 32 bit platforms.

I didn't know that, thank you. Then I would recommend CentOS with XFS.

Regarding one of the posts about power loss - not sure about that. We were using Linux XFS (before SGI XFS) since, I believe 1998 - not sure about power losses (usually we have multiple power supplies in such units/servers), but we did have one or two catastrophic crashes with XFS and we've lost data once. Not to compare to ext3 (I like it too for specific purposes), but only about 10% our (OUR) servers are using ext3 and we had may be about 10 catastrophic failures when we were not able to restore the data. This is just our experience, not an opinion which one is better or worse - all of them good when they work .

[w2interactive]

Out of curiosity. Is there any reason in particular that you need one large filesystem like that?