On Wed, 5 Jul 2006, Markus W Kilbinger wrote:
> Im planning to build a huge file server. My idea was to put about 8
> big IDE or SATA disks (500 - 750 GB each) into a PC/i386 based system
> and create a big raid(4) on it (RAID level 5, I thought).
>
> I guess I have to use ffs2 to create partitions larger than 1 (2?)
> tera bytes. Does this work sufficiently, yet?

How many partitions (i.e. what size each?).

> Can raid(4) handle partitions of that size?
>
> Which (actual) mainboards, SATA-Controller and NIC's are suitable for
> this task and supported well by NetBSD?

I've used 3ware 8506-8 and 8506-12 RAID controllers for similar things 
(the final number is the number of drives supported). However, they only 
support up to 2TB per array.

I've created 1.6TB (and possibly 2TB) ffs2 partitions (this was with 
NetBSD 2.0 originally) which sent disklabel a bit crazy - negative numbers 
of cylinders, but it worked. NetBSD 3.0 has fixed that problem.

I'll leave others to comment on success with RAIDframe for such sizes.

-- 
Stephen