Linux and drives > 2 terabytes; questions.

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Thu Apr 4 20:06:10 UTC 2013


I don't remember all the lore to do with >2 TB disks.

I'm formatting one now as a backup for a MythTV hoard.

I think that the >2TB disks show sector sizes of 4k now.

The previous generation of <=2G drives often had 4K sectors but lied
to the computer, saying that they had 512 sectors.  This kept dumb old
systems (Windows and very old Linux) working but it made Linux make
foolish decisions.  Eventually, Linux changed to take this into
account.  Foolish folks said Linux couldn't handle 4K sectors but
in fact what it could not handle was lying.

I don't know if dumb old BIOSes can boot from disks with 4k sectors.

I'm using gparted for formatting.  The disk came with an NTFS
partition (and Windows backup software).  So I rewrote the partition
table.  I was offered "msdos", meaning the old partition mechanism, so
I guess that it works OK with 3TB disks if the sectors are 4k.  I
chose GPT.

I'm using ext3 because my old systems might not have solid ext4
(superstition, not fact).  It is likely that ext2 is just as good for
my application as ext3.  fsck on a 3TB disk does take a while.
What is the best filesystem for backing up large files?

It is unfortunate that gparted can't be told to reduce the number of
inodes when it is creating a filesystem.  When you are backing up 1.2G
files (1 hour of TV), the normal proportion of inodes is a waste.  It
gave me 183148544!  
	/usr/sbin/mkfs.ext3 -T largefile4 -L Arthur /dev/sdi1
gave me 715424.

I toyed with the idea of devoting a few gigs to make the backup drive
bootable (with a normal desktop distro) but it is too much bother for
a "just in case".
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists





More information about the Legacy mailing list