terabyte limit

[Shawn Ostapuk]

I have around 10 IDE drives which add up to over a terabyte. My goal
is to use them all as one big drive using any means necessary (I have a
backup so redundency is not needed, only space in this situation)

I used to use vinum (and still would like to), i hit the terabyte limit
with UFS and was told i would have to upgrade to 5.1 in order to take
advantage of UFS2 and > 1TB filesystem -- so thats what i've done.
However I still seem to have the exactly same problems. I'm now trying
it on a whole new box and set of drives with the same set of problems.

It doesn't matter if i use vinum or ccdconfig -- they all work fine and
predictably, until I make it larger than a terabyte then i get the 
following on freebsd 5.1 RELEASE:

with ccdconfig

# ccdconfig -cv ccd0 16 none /dev/ad1s1e .. /dev/ad10s1e
ccd0: 10 componets (ad1s1e, .., ad10s1e), 2223956864 blocks interleaved
at 16 blocks
# newfs /dev/ccd0
newfs: wtfs: 512 bytes at sector 2223956863: Invalid argument

with vinum

# newfs /dev/vinum/vinum0
/dev/vinum/vinum0: 1085915.5MB (2223954992 sectors) block size 16384,
fragment size 2048
          using 5910 cylinder groups of 183.77MB, 11761 blks, 23552 inodes.
newfs: can't read old UFS1 superblock: read error from block device:
Invalid arguement

If i remove any single drive in the configuration making it < 1TB it
works fine, i can newfs and what not. Add it back up to >1TB and newfs
breaks.

I've heard vinum has no practical limits, and should work fine beyond a
terabyte, and i've spoken directly with people who have newfs'd over a
terabyte using hardware raid (3ware) -- so I'm just baffled. Am I doing
something wrong or is this configuration just simply not supported yet?

It may be intestersting to note if I do new newfs -N for testing i get no
errors and the output looks great.

Any suggestions or confirmation on weather or not this should work or
not or alternative ideas? 12channel IDE raid controller is about $700
more than i got right now :)

Thanks for any help -- been driving me nuts for a while now.