Format Big Drives (4TB) In The Installer?

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Hi all;

I cross posted this to the fedora list since we use Fedora as a test bed from time to time, however given this is a production server we’ll likely be running CentOS.

we’ve just ordered a new server
(http://www.spectrumservers.com/ssproducts/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory&&idproductx7)

Originally I tried to simply upgrade an older server with more drive space, I installed six (6) 4TB drives and did a new CentOS 6.5 install but the OS would not allow me to configure more than 2TB per drive.

Subsequent research leads me to conclude that if the bios supports UEFI
and the installer boots as such then the installer should see 4TB drives without any issues. I’m also assuming that any server I order today
(i.e. a more modern server) should ship with UEFI support in the bios.

Are my conclusions above per UEFI correct?

Thanks in advance

8 thoughts on - Format Big Drives (4TB) In The Installer?

  • anaconda’s installation time partitioning tool doesn’t support GPT
    format disks, as far as I know.

    if you boot to a shell prompt, and use gparted and the lvw commands to setup the disks the way you want, making sure /boot is in the first terabyte of the drive, then you should be able to install to those existing partitions/lvs…

  • Thanks for the advice, can someone point me to a good step by step how to per setting up a RAID 10 volume per the parted & GPT tools?

    Thanks

  • You might find this usefull, text on official CentOS Facebook group. GPT
    is separate from RAID’s, so GPT is not covered, but RAID part should be the same:
    https://www.facebook.com/notes/CentOS/software-raid-on-rhel-6/10151254589767728

    Original text is here:
    https://linux.dell.com/files/whitepapers/Software_RAID_on_Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux_v6.pdf

    For RAID10 I suggest far 2, and boot regular raid1

    Creating Boot RAID1:
    [root@kancelarija]# mdadm –create /dev/md9 –level=1 –raid-disks=2
    /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 –metadata=0.90

    Creating RAID10 far,2:

    [root@kancelarija]# mdadm –create /dev/md9 –level –layout

  • Ljubomir Ljubojevic wrote:
    to per setting up a RAID 10 volume per the parted & GPT tools?
    is separate from RAID’s, so GPT is not covered, but RAID part should be the same:
    /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 –metadata=0.90
    –raid-disks=2 /dev/sdd9 /dev/sde9
    We have a good bit of RAID here, and GPT, with all the 3TB drives we got last year. We’ve added stuff in our kickstart script to partition with GPT
    and parted (fdisk doesn’t do GPT, if you’d missed that). In the ks, we mklabel GPT, then do NOT clear partitioning when you go to create partitions, or it’ll blow away the GPT.

    Also, my manager is very much not a fan of LVM, but we do have *large*
    RAIDs – we use RAID 6 for data, though we’ve used RAID 1 for /boot and /. Since I keep reading that “we really need to fix the fsck,etc tools for >
    16TB in the next year” for the last 4 years (at least), I partition them as 14-16TB, and that works just fine.

    mark

  • Nowdays, any data volumes other than root and boot I format xfs. no fsck or > 16TB problems there.

    I generally use raid10 for data, as my data is usually database oriented and raid6(0) performs poorly on committed random writes. raid6 or 6+0
    gets used for large archival ‘nearline’ applications, like a backup server.

    After avoiding lvm for years, I’ve found its too handy. the root vg will have an adequate sized / and /home and lots of unassigned space, so if I need more space for / or /home I can allocate it later. I tend to use dedicated xfs file systems for my database server versus other application file storage requirements, these will all be on the data vg.

  • Unless your server supports UEFI it will probably not boot from a GPT
    partitioned disk. RAID controllers usually support splitting off a part of the array as a boot disk. I recently did this with an old server with a 3ware controller and 3TB disks. I created a RAID-10 and then in the advanced settings I told it to use 50G as a boot disk. The result was that I got a 50G /dev/sda which I could partition with a DOS label and
    2.95T /dev/sdb which I let anaconda put a GPT label on.

    Anyway if you are using a BIOS instead of UEFI you need to provide a disk with a DOS partition label to boot from.

    Regards,
    Dennis