mkfs.ext3 on a 9TB volume

[frcaen at gmail.com (Francois Caen)]

On 9/11/05, Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Having hit a similar issue (big FS, I wanted XFS, but needed to run centos
> 4), I just went ahead and stuck with ext3.  My FS is 5.5TiB -- a software
> RAID0 across 2 3w-9xxx arrays.  I had no issues formatting it and have had
> no issues in testing or production with it.  So, it can be done.  Perhaps
> the bugs you're hitting are in the FC driver layer?

ext3 had a 4TB limit:
http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/FAQs/ext3-faq.html)
which I didn't know when I started this thread.

I found it the hard way, through testing.
There are ways to force past that limit (mkpartfs ext2 in parted, then
tune2fs -j), but the resulting filesystem is totally unstable.

Joshua, how the heck did you format your 5.5TB in ext3? You 100% sure
it's not mounted as ext2?

Francois