Re: twe driver, 1+ terabyte array, fdisk and disklabel

From: Brooks Davis <brooks_at_one-eyed-alien.net>
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 15:22:31 -0700
On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 04:55:20PM -0500, Mark Nipper wrote:
> 	Haha.  There are only two ways I've found to make this
> work so far, and I'm not happy with either really.  One is
> simple.  Use RAID-10, and my disk array drops to 1T.  Fast, but
> not what I'm looking for.  The second is to use "create slice" in
> fdisk, and it puts the default number of 3.4 billion sectors in
> the field for the size of the slice I want to create.  When I hit
> enter, it actually only ends up using 2 billion some odd sectors,
> and then I can create a second slice of the remaining drive.  At
> that point, disklabel at least runs without dying right away, but
> then I have an approximately 1T slice followed by a 600 something
> gigabyte slice.  Again, not what I'm looking for.
> 
> 	Any advice?  Are the disk tools just not 64 bit clean or
> something?  Or is this a kernel, device driver or fs layer
> problem?

I ran into this recently myself.  The main problem is with sysinstall,
but there are other problems after that.  Sysinstall should be able to
handle up to 2TB disks since that's what MBR partition tables support
according to Microsoft, but obviously it chokes earlier.  Soon we're
going to have to find a way to move to GPT parititions because 3.3TB
arrays will be feasiable by Q1 2004 (probably sooner) according to the
3Ware rep I spoke to recently.

My workaround was to split the array into a 2 disk RAID1 and a 6 disk
RAID5.  Sysinstall will install on the small mirror and then you can use
the RAID5 array raw.  On some other systems, I'm not going to be booting
from the arrays so I'll use the entire array as a large RAID5 volume
without any partions.

-- Brooks

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Received on Wed Aug 13 2003 - 13:22:35 UTC

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