max ext2 partition

[plug@arcticmail.com]

Something that I've done in the past for two 20G
RAIDs using ext2 is to use mke2fs' "-N" option.

IIRC, I used a -N of ~150,000, so I guess the
bytes-to-inode ratio was ~143,165.  Given that the
average size of files today (a .DOC containing
"hello, world" is what, a Meg nowadays? :) )
seems to be on the increase, I don't think that
143,165 bytes is entirely unreasonable.

IIRC, using mke2fs defaults had created something
like ~5,000,000 inodes.  Anyway, after this change,
running e2fsck went from ~40 minutes to something
like ~5 minutes.

If you have a filesystem with quite a bit of data
on it, you can get an idea of your own data's "real
world" bytes-to-inode ratio using "df -k", "df -i",
and "dc".  After you buy that fat, shiny new disk,
you can use this "real world" ratio (with some
padding, of course; and possibly combine it with
a larger blocksize) to optimize the filesystems
you're creating on the new disk.

Also for large filesystems, keep the "-m" (reserved
blocks percentage) value in mind.  The default is 5%.
In JLF's 1T case, if he went with the default (yeah,
like that will EVER happen), ~54,975,581,389 bytes
of disk space would be reserved for exclusive use
by the root user.


D

* On Tue, Nov 14, 2000 at 10:15:50PM -0700, Kevin Buettner wrote:
> On Nov 14, 10:02pm, Don Harrop wrote:
> 
> > I've been doing some Linux on some bigger HD's lately.  Seems like the
> > largest partition ext2 can support is 8gigs.  Am I stuck with this or is
> > there a trick to creating a larger partition that I don't know about?  Is
> > there a way to connect two drives together as one logical partition?  I
> > wan't to create the biggest partition I can in Linux with the utilities
> > that come with the a standard Linux distro.
> 
> I have a 17GB ext2 partition on one of my drives.  ext2 can go even
> larger, but I'm not sure it's worth it due to extremely long fsck
> times.
> 
> My guess is that you just need a newer version of lilo.
> 
> Kevin
> 
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