Re: Format ext3 hard drives
>> On Tuesday 22 March 2011 02:42:36 pm Dan wrote:
D> I am using the netinst to install Debian. I have one hard drive of 160GB
D> and 2 hard drives of 2TB. Each hard drive has a ext3 partition for the
D> whole drive. I used ext3 instead of ext4, because that is the default
D> value in Squeeze. The netinst is creating the ext3 partitions but it is
D> taking for ever.
>> On Tue, 22 Mar 2011 15:19:12 -0800, Greg Madden <gomadtroll@gci.net> said:
G> Not sure about the initial format but all subsequent fsck take lots of
G> time with ext3, esp 2 TB.
If you're really set on ext3, specifying larger files and fewer inodes
will definitely shorten the partition build and fsck times. I have some
Seagate 1.5Tb drives, and I decided on two ~700Gb partitions instead of
a single giant one. You might have to fool around with fdisk to get the
sizes just the way you like.
Details are below.
--
Karl Vogel I don't speak for the USAF or my company
Q: What's black and tan and looks good on a lawyer?
A: A Rottweiler. --John J. Irvine
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disk use:
me% df
Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 130 6 117 5% /boot
/dev/sdb2 19501 445 18080 3% /root
/dev/sdb5 7805 418 6997 6% /var
/dev/sdb6 699594 235065 450509 35% /space1
/dev/sdb7 699601 161094 524487 24% /space2
me% df -i
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sdb1 34136 11 34125 1% /boot
/dev/sdb2 313344 11 313333 1% /root
/dev/sdb5 126976 11 126965 1% /var
/dev/sdb6 11216896 169292 11047604 2% /space1
/dev/sdb7 11216896 64416 11152480 1% /space2
Partitions:
# partition table of /dev/sdb
unit: sectors
/dev/sdb1 : start= 63, size= 273042, Id=83, bootable
/dev/sdb2 : start= 273105, size= 40017915, Id=83
/dev/sdb3 : start= 40291020, size= 2008125, Id=82
/dev/sdb4 : start= 42299145, size=2887362450, Id= 5
/dev/sdb5 : start= 42299208, size= 16016742, Id=83
/dev/sdb6 : start= 58316013, size=1435664727, Id=83
/dev/sdb7 : start=1493980803, size=1435680792, Id=83
This script ran in about 25 minutes on a CentOS system:
#!/bin/ksh -x
# make filesystems with fewer inodes, larger files.
export PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
date; mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
date; mkfs.ext3 -J size=400 -i 65536 /dev/sdb2
date; mkswap -L SWAP-sdb3 /dev/sdb3
date; mkfs.ext3 -J size=400 -i 65536 /dev/sdb5
date; mkfs.ext3 -J size=400 -i 65536 -m 2 /dev/sdb6
date; mkfs.ext3 -J size=400 -i 65536 -m 2 /dev/sdb7
exit 0
Using fewer inodes added a total of nearly 80 Gb of available space on
/space1 and /space2, compared to one huge partition with default inode setup.
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