USB external drive size limitations?

[JHorne]

Well im fairly certain that my filesystem has less than a million files, its
mostly just large .iso files from my ftp server.  I can defiantly quickly
check it out against a windows computer before I plug it back in the next
time im at my colo.

Ok, so since im about to recompile and force myself to reboot, other than
the options SMP that I already added in, is there anything else I really
need to look at before I do it again?  What about the scheduler?  Is the ULE
over 4BSD really a big deal?  The article I read said that SMP machines
really prefer it, is that the case?

If there is anything else you would have wanted to teach the last new person
you instructed in the finer points of kernel compiling, but didn't... now's
your chance!!!

cheers,
jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Fabian Keil
Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2006 12:13 PM
To: Jonathan Horne
Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: USB external drive size limitations?

Fabian Keil <freebsd-listen at fabiankeil.de> wrote:

> "Jonathan Horne" <freebsd at dfwlp.com> wrote:
> 
> > Last night I plugged in a 300GB Maxtor USB drive into my FreeBSD 6.0
> > server (with a fat filesystem), and it told me it was too big!!
> 
> > Haha, its full of my backups from my previous operating system
> > (fedora) and now im going to have a fun time getting those files
> > onto my new FreeBSD server!  Can someone recommend a course of
> > action for me here?  Google isn't really turning up anything
> > interesting relating to size of external drives.
>  
> Do you already have "options MSDOSFS_LARGE" in your kernel?

Forgot to mention that it isn't perfect. I believe the limitations
described in http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/relnotes-i386.html
are still true:

|The MSDOSFS_LARGE kernel option has been added to support FAT32 file
|systems bigger than 128GB. This option is disabled by default. It uses
|at least 32 bytes of kernel memory for each file on disk; furthermore
|it is only safe to use in certain controlled situations, such as
|read-only mount with less than 1 million files and so on. Exporting
|these large file systems over NFS is not supported.

Fabian
-- 
http://www.fabiankeil.de/