On 7/5/2012 6:36 AM, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
At 16TB+ scale with maildir you should be using XFS on kernel 3.x, not EXT4. Your performance will be significantly better, as in 30% or much
why you want to make 16TB partition at first place?
You wouldn't partition the large LUN. You'd simply directly format it with XFS. Laying a partition table on it would introduce the real possibility of filesystem misalignment on the RAID stripe if one wasn't extremely careful about the partitioning alignment.
But your question seems to relate to reason for using a single very large filesystem. In which case the answer is typically a single file tree/name space. EXT3/4 and Reiser apparently aren't super reliable at very large sizes. XFS has no such negative issues at large scale, and in fact was specifically designed for extremely large scale. As I mentioned previously, 50TB+ XFS filesystems are mundane and there are many 100TB+ in the wild.
As with any small scale filesystem, you'll need a backup system capable of handling your very large XFS filesystem and a proper strategy.
-- Stan