# 800-900 GB home partition, any problems? :)

## Maf

Hello. I'm to create 800-900 GB partition for my home data, which will currently be filled with about 200 GB of data. I used to work with 400GB ext3 home partition and everything used to be alright. But as this 900 GB sounds so big, I want to ask you gentoo'ers if there are any disadvangates of such a step. I can ask you already: is linux/ext4 smart enought to use first blocks first, so that reads/writes are faster? The disk is Samsung F3 1000 GB. Thanks in advance for any tips.

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## eccerr0r

I'm not sure for ext4 but at least for ext3/ext2 it will prefer to try to allocate in larger extents to prevent fragmentation before simply filling up the beginning of the disk.  Fragmentation will probably hurt performance more than inner tracks?

Linux generally doesn't care about how big your partitions are.

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## tgR10

```
];-> df -h|grep home

/dev/sdb1             901G  828G   27G  97% /home
```

no problems at all :) and it's ext3

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## Maf

I know it will work, but are there any cons / nuances of a big partition, for example with performance?

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## eccerr0r

The largest single disk I have has a 700+G partition, I don't see any performance hit with large partitions.  My largest logical volume is 1T on my RAID5, it also seems to perform fine.

After these disk increase in the past, 2x-3x size bumps don't faze me much anymore, though the 10x order-of-magnitude jumps are still impressive.

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## tgR10

i got 1k block size not 4k and i didn't seen any performance issue to compare it to same filesystems smaller partition and 4k block size

but there maybe some (ms slowtime) i'm just not seeing it so there is no issue for me :P

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## cach0rr0

one gotcha is if you use LVM - http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/articles/lvm-p2.xml

the default extent size will be insufficient for that size of disk (all doc'd in the above page)

far as a partition that large, I only ever use XFS (with logbufs=8 ) as it creates in a snap, mounts quickly, and does very very well with a situation in which the partition becomes fairly full

```

gentoob0x ~ # df -h |grep mapper

/dev/mapper/vg0-data  1.3T   43G  1.3T   4% /data

gentoob0x ~ # mount |grep mapper

/dev/mapper/vg0-data on /data type xfs (rw,noatime,logbufs=8)

```

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## EzInKy

 *cach0rr0 wrote:*   

> one gotcha is if you use LVM - http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/articles/lvm-p2.xml
> 
> the default extent size will be insufficient for that size of disk (all doc'd in the above page)
> 
> far as a partition that large, I only ever use XFS (with logbufs=8 ) as it creates in a snap, mounts quickly, and does very very well with a situation in which the partition becomes fairly full
> ...

 

I just started testing btrfs after following some advice in the thread devoted to it by creating a single file system consisting of four 2TB drives, and I got to say I was blown away by how fast and easy it was to set up.

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## cach0rr0

 *EzInKy wrote:*   

> 
> 
> I just started testing btrfs after following some advice in the thread devoted to it by creating a single file system consisting of four 2TB drives, and I got to say I was blown away by how fast and easy it was to set up.

 

I will be making that move myself soon as it stabilizes a bit more. As I read about fs corruption, data loss, and hard lockups, I've been nervous about making the switch for anything important (see the zen-sources discussion thread; i use zen). The zen folks are quite good at ensuring the best btrfs branches are merged far as I can tell, and btrfs looks very promising, but I'm going to wait a bit. 

So for now I stick with reiser/xfs depending on purpose.

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## EzInKy

 *cach0rr0 wrote:*   

>  *EzInKy wrote:*   
> 
> I just started testing btrfs after following some advice in the thread devoted to it by creating a single file system consisting of four 2TB drives, and I got to say I was blown away by how fast and easy it was to set up. 
> 
> I will be making that move myself soon as it stabilizes a bit more. As I read about fs corruption, data loss, and hard lockups, I've been nervous about making the switch for anything important (see the zen-sources discussion thread; i use zen). The zen folks are quite good at ensuring the best btrfs branches are merged far as I can tell, and btrfs looks very promising, but I'm going to wait a bit. 
> ...

 

The data is all backed up on the ext3 formatted drives where it was originally stored B-)

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## JanR

Hi,

I absolutely have no problems with a larger ext3 home partition:

```

/dev/md6              1.7T  1.3T  446G  75% /raid

```

Greetings,

Jan

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