FreeBSD and large harddrives

[Bruce Cran]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2010 13:42:14 +0100
Andy Wodfer <wodfer at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks! I didn't know I could use amd64 on Intel servers. Then my next
> questions will be: How about the ports collection - does the 64bit
> version have most of the ports? I need ffmpeg, php, apache, mysql,
> imagemagick, ghostscript, exiftools and a few more small ones.

amd64 is well supported now. It used to be that lots of ports didn't
work, but I think that's mostly (totally?) been fixed now.

> Excellent. I'm using ZFS on a FreeNAS installation. Is ZFS still
> considered experimental on FreeBSD or is it now production ready?
> What tool or command is used to partition/format/create a large ZFS
> drive?

The stability has greatly improved over the last year but it can still
have issues. Apparently if something goes wrong you'll normally have to
restore from backups since fixing filesystem errors isn't something you
can normally do.

There's a guide to installing FreeBSD on zfs at
http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot . Note that even if you
have a 'legacy' BIOS you can still use GPT - if you use the MBR scheme
you'll be limited to a maximum partition of 2TB.

-- 
Bruce Cran