Raid Array Over 2Tb on Samba

[Charles Swiger]

On May 3, 2005, at 3:14 PM, Richard Collyer wrote:
> I plan on building a raid array of 8*400GB disks raid 5. Now as win2k 
> cant support partitions over 2tb and I right in thinking that this is 
> for the local machine only and that over samba (array in FreeBSD 5.4 
> machine [when it comes out]) it should be able to see all space or 
> will I have to carve it up.

I would not recommend trying to use greater than 2GB partitions via 
Samba, or even natively, at this time.  There are significant issues, 
such as being able to run fsck against such large partitions without 
fsck's memory usage consuming excessive resources.

If you need to set up such a massive NAS fileserver, you really ought 
to consider dedicated products from companies like Auspex and NetApp.  
Another alternative might be an Apple Xserve RAID with Xsan, but this 
doesn't have the track record of my earlier suggestions.

-- 
-Chuck