Date: Thu, 14 Jan 1999 11:25:25 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Russell Ingram <rfi@sandiegoca.ncr.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How big can a FreeBSD filesystem be? Message-ID: <19990114112525.M8886@freebie.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.SUN.3.91.990113130007.27893C-100000@ws098>; from Russell Ingram on Wed, Jan 13, 1999 at 01:34:52PM -0800 References: <Pine.SUN.3.91.990113130007.27893C-100000@ws098>
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On Wednesday, 13 January 1999 at 13:34:52 -0800, Russell Ingram wrote: > In most older versions of UNIX the maximum size a useful file system can > be is limited by "fsck"'s ability to check that file system. Many older > versions of UNIX "fsck" doesn't work on file systems greater then 2 G-BYTEs. Many versions of UNIX System V don't support file systems larger than 2 GB, but that's because they use signed 32 bit pointers. > With disks getting bigger by leaps and bounds supported file system size > becomes an issue. > > How Big a file system will FreeBSD support (including all the disk > tools)? The simple answer is ``larger than you can build''. The largest I've seen is about 60 GB, but 4.4BSD has 64 bit pointers, so I suppose the answer must be something like 9.2 Exabytes (if that's the correct unit; anyway, 9.2 * 10**18 bytes, or 9.2 million terabytes). Possibly some other problem would limit things more. > And How Big is a reasonable file system? It comes back to the space that fsck needs. 100 GB seems a reasonable limit to me, but others may disagree. > I just talked to a with a system administrator who repartitioned his > disk array on a SOLARIS system (where "fsck" handles much larger then > 2 G-BYTE file systems) from 64 G-BYTE partitions to 32 G-BYTE and is > now planning to reduce again to 16 G-BYTE because "fsck" takes too long. I wonder why he needs to run fsck. > I'm using FreeBSD 2.6.6. The SCSI disk I'm purchasing are 9.1 G-BYTE. After > /, /usr, /var, and swap I figure I'll have 7 G-BYTEs left and want to > keep it as one file system. Two at most. I'm also assuming I might add a > 18 or 24 G-BYTE disk latter. That shouldn't be a problem. Many people, myself included, have file systems in the 10 GB range. I haven't had much trouble with fsck times. Greg -- See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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