From: Sandon Van Ness <sandon@van-ness.com>
Subject: Is >16TB support considered stable?
Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 09:52:34 -0700
Message-ID: <4BFFF4D2.6020908@van-ness.com>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
To: linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org
Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org

I have a 36 TB (33.5276 TiB) device. I was originally planning to run
JFS like I am doing on my 18 TB (16.6697 TiB) partition but the
userspace tools for file-system creation (mkfs) on JFS do not correctly
create file-systems over 32 TiB. XFS is not an option for me (I have had
bad experiences and its too corruptible) and btrfs is too beta for me.
My only options thus are ext4 or JFS (limited to 32 TiB).

I would rather not waste ~ 1TiB of space which will likely go to other
partitions that would normally only be 500 GiB but will now be 1.5 TiB
if I can and with some of my testing of ext4 I think it could be a
viable solution. I heard that with the pu branch 64-bit addressing
exists so you can successfully create/fsck >16 TiB file-systems. I did
read on the mailing lists that there were some problems on 32-bit
machine but i will only use this file-sytem on x86_64.

So here is my question to you guys:

Is the pu branch pretty stable? Is it stable enough to have a 33 TiB
file-system in the real-world and be as stable and work as well as a <16
TiB file-system or am I better off losing out some of my space and
making a 32 TiB (minus a little) JFS partition and just stick to what I
know works and works well?