ext4 file systems and the 16 TB limit – how to *solve* it
August 18th, 2011
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File systems do have limits. Thats no surprise. ext3 had a limit at 16 TB file system size. If you needed more space you´d have to use another file system for instance XFS or JFS or spilt the capacity into multiple mount points.
ext4 was designed to allow far more larger file systems than ext3. According to wikipedia ext4 has a maximum file system size of 1 EiB (approx. one exabyte or 1024 PB or 1024*1024 TB).
Now if you´d try to create one single large file system with ext4 on every linux distribution out there (including OEL 6.1; as of 18th August 2011) you will end up with:
[root@localhost ~]# mkfs.ext4 /dev/iscsi/test mke4fs 1.41.9 (22-Aug-2009) mkfs.ext4: Size of device /dev/iscsi/test too big to be expressed in 32 bit susing a blocksize of 4096.
This post is about how to solve the issue.
Categories: UNIX