5.8TB RAID5 SATA Array Questions

[Edgar Martinez]

Yeah it was pretty much boo hoo hoo...it appears we have either backplane,
MI cable issues, or controller problems...I was only getting 11 drives
available with improper identification...so I am going thru the tedious task
of ripping it all down, and testing backplanes, drives, and cables...one at
a time...

On a side note...I was able to do my "bastardization" procedure using a live
cd to get it up to 3.8TB...that was as far as I took it as I want to get the
other problems fixed first...

Unfortunately, due to my determination (aka: sore loser) one of two options
exist...this WILL work...or one of us is going to die trying...

Is it just me, or does everyone try to plead, reason, and insult their
equipment...I swear to god, it derives pleasure from frustration...

-----Original Message-----
From: Benson Wong [mailto:tummytech at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2005 6:29 PM
To: emartinez at crockettint.com
Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: 5.8TB RAID5 SATA Array Questions

> 
> So theoretically it should go over 1000TB.I've conducted several
bastardized
> installations due to sysinstall not being able to do anything over the 2TB
> limit by creating the partition ahead of time.I am going to be attacking
> this tonight and my efforts will be primarily focused on creating one
large
> 5.8TB slice..wish me luck!! 
> 
>   
> 
> PS: Muhaa haa haa! 
You're probably going to run into "boo hoo hoo hoo". Most likely you
won't be able to get over the 2TB limit. Also don't use sysinstall, I
was never able to get it to work well. Probably because my arrays were
mounted over fiber channel and fdisk craps out.

This is what I did: 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 bs=1k count=1
disklabel -rw da0 audo
newfs /dev/da0

That creates one large slice, UFS2, for FreeBSD. Let know if you get
it over 2TB, I was never able to have any luck.

Another reason you might want to avoid a super large file system is
that UFS2 is not journaling. If the server crashes it will take fschk
a LONG time to check all those inodes!

Ben.