Question Regarding Cent OS 7.8.2003 Compatibility With Large SAS Disks

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Hello,

I have a blade server with SAS HDD’s of 12TB in total.
3 HDD’s of 4TB each.

Is it possible to install Cent OS 7.8.2003 on 12TB disk space?
I will be installing Cent OS on the bare metal HW.

I referred = https://wiki.CentOS.org/About/Product But slightly confused with the ‘maximum file size’ row for ext4 FS.

Thanks & Regards, Amey.

7 thoughts on - Question Regarding Cent OS 7.8.2003 Compatibility With Large SAS Disks

  • That’s not a problem at all. In the server world, 12 TB is actually fairly small. :)

    —
    Digimer Papers and Projects: https://alteeve.com/w/
    “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” – Stephen Jay Gould

  • Thanks Digimer & R C for the quick help.

    I am going to touch the blade servers after a gap of decade hence I
    was in doubt :-)
    The Cloud computing era has wiped my knowledge about server HW & OS
    compatibility :-/

    Regards, Amey.

  • what I typically rather do is install the OS on a way smaller drive, that way if the OS drive is trashed, the data array is still there, 
    also, it is easier to create a clean install that way. (of course a partition could work too).

  • Hi,

    We have servers with 500 Tb in line with SAS attachment on a SAN without any problem!

    It’s perhaps a firmware problem with your SAS card, no?

  • the SAS hardware has to be SAS2 or newer, as SAS1 had a maximum physical drive size of around 2tb

    and the boot volume has to be GPT as MBR has a 2TB limit.

    otherwise, sky is the limit, however, what the other guys say, I do NOT put my OS on my data raids, its usually on its own mirror of two small drives.

    I also tend to avoid “hardware” raid cards, and prefer HBA cards that present the drives as plain SAS devices, then use the OS’s native storage management for raid (mdraid + LVM for Linux, ZFS on FreeBSD, etc).. I
    generally spec raid 10 for performance data, and raid 6 or 60 for bulk data. raid5 is frowned on these days, disks are so big, and rebuild times are long enough that the risk of a double failure is fairly high.

  • CentOS 8 defaults to XFS, not to ext4, so that row has no bearing on your use case.

    Although I wouldn’t recommend overriding this default, if you did, I don’t see why you’re worried in the first place. 12 TB < 50 TB, the limit for partitions created by the stock versions of e4fsprogs included with CentOS.