Growing UFS beyond 2 TB

[Jan Mikkelsen]

Richard Noorlandt wrote:
> I'm currently configuring a large fileserver (Dual Opteron and
> an Areca 1160
> for hardware RAID), and I'm running into some partitioning
> problems.
> Currently, I have 6 500 GB drives to put in a main RAID-6
> array, giving me 2
> TB of usable storage. Now, I want this 2 TB to be partitioned
> in several
> separate partitions of various sizes. The last partition will
> be 1 TB, and
> will be the most important partition on the array.
> 
> Now my problem is that this 1 TB partition must be able to
> grow beyond 2 TB
> at a later stage (after adding extra HD's). If I understand
> correctly, it is
> not possible to grow a UFS partition beyond 2 TB when the
> drive is
> partitioned with fdisk. One should use GPT instead. However,
> it appears that
> GPT currently has no way to resize partitions, giving me no
> possibility to
> enlarge the 1TB partition and run growfs.
> 
> Does anyone have a suggestion? Or am I overlooking something?
> I can hardly
> imagine that what I want is very rare, so I think there must
> be some
> solution.

You can use the Areca controller to create separate devices/LUNs,
and then ignore fdisk/gpt/labels altogether for the large
filesystem you want to grow, and just stick the filesystem directly
on /dev/da1, or whatever it ends up being.

As a bonus, you don't have to do all the calculations to figure out
where the partitions should start.  See:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2006-October/002312.h
tml

Regards,

Jan Mikkelsen.