format/newfs larger external consumer drives

[Dieter BSD]

Don whY asks:
> So, fsck's effort (and execution *time*) is based *mostly* on inodes?

I don't know about *mostly*, but reducing the number of inodes
significantly reduced fsck time for me.

> In my case, there isn't any real physical room for an internal disk.
> I'm using Dell FX160's -- they'll support a SATA laptop drive

Assuming that "SATA laptop drive" means 2.5" form factor,
just add a 6 TB SSD.  (available this month, but the price is
top secret)

> The point is to get rid of the piles of CD/DVD media that I've
> accumulated over the years

Someone must make a jukebox for those.

>> I am very tired of having an entire machine panic just because
>> one disk decided to take a nap.  This is not how you get 5 9s.  :-(
>
> Or, power glitches, firmware bugs, etc.

A UPS eats power glitches for breakfast.  Firmware is a problem.
More and more mainboards can have FLOSS firmware, but there is also
buggy firmware in disks and other devices.

Warren helpfully pointed us to

> http://sourceforge.net/projects/fuse-ufs2/

Thanks, Warren!  Sourceforge was kaput when I tried to check it out.
I'm hoping that it is a high quality implementation, and, being fuse,
will solve the kernel panic problem. I plan to look at the filesystem
regression tests and see if I can think up any additional test cases.

Chris H typed:
> For the record, SourceForge hasn't been available for quite
> some time.

Slashdot reports:
   The short version is that a
   storage fault led to significant filesystem corruption, and we had to
   restore a massive amount of data from backups.  There's a post at
   the SourceForge blog going into a bit more detail, and describing the
   steps our Siteops team took (and is still taking) to restore service.
http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-infrastructure-and-service-restoration/

Last time I looked, some (not all) parts of fuse-ufs2 had recovered.

> I thought this (fuse-ufs2) might be a nice addition to the ports
> tree, and was hoping to put it there.

Sounds good.