Re: "big" machines running Debian?

[lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Lennart Sorensen)]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 09:56:04AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
> Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes:
> 
> > On 02/25/2009 03:48 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> >> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 02:55:09PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote:
> >>> Who boots off of (or puts / on) a 2TB partition?
> >>
> >> Someone with a 4 drive raid5 on a hardware controller with 750GB SATA
> >> drives.  Hence the only drive in the system is a 2.25TB device with
> >> partitions and everything on it.  The root partition isn't very big,
> >> but it's on a drive that is bigger than 2TB and hence needs something
> >> other than a DOS partition table.
> >>
> >
> > Ah.  The minicomputer tradition I come from (and thus how I organized
> > my home PC) is to have a relatively small OS/swap disk and a separate
> > "data" array.
> >
> > Of course, max device size always gets bigger, and smaller devices
> > fall off the market...
> 
> I'm aiming for a small SSD disk for the system and seperate "data"
> array that can be spun down most of the time.
> 
> >> It doesn't take much with modern SATA drives to hit 2TB.  Given we can
> >> get 1.5TB in a single drive, how many months before we can get 2TB in
> >> a single disk.
> >>
> >
> > Later this year.
> 
> Waiting for them. 1.5TB disks don't mix so well with 1TB disks in
> raid. I don't want to split the disks into 0.5TB partitions and then
> raid over those.
> 
> Anyone know how/if windows copes with 2TB disks? Does it understand
> GPT too?

By the looks of it, it supports GPT for data drives, but is incapable of
booting from it (except itanium versions where it is the default format)

And only 64bit versions of XP and 2003 server appear to support it,
while vista and 2008 server seem to always support it (but not for boot
unless your machine has EFI).  It seems microsoft belives you need EFI
to boot from GPT, even though grub2/linux has no such limitation.
Go figure.

Of course a 2TB disk is OK with MBR still.  Anything larger will have
a problem though.

-- 
Len Sorensen