Reaching Beyond Two-Terabyte Filesystems

Jeremy Andrews writes: "Peter Chubb posted a patch to the lkml, with which he's now managed to mount a 15 terabyte file (using JFS and the loopback device). Without the patch, Peter explains, "Linux is limited to 2TB filesystems even on 64-bit systems, because there are various places where the block offset on disc are assigned to unsigned or int 32-bit variables." Peter works on the Gelato project in Australia. His efforts include cleaning up Linux's large filesystem support, removing 32-bit filesystem limitations. When I asked him about the new 64-bit filesystem limits, he offered a comprehensive answer and this interesting link. The full thread can be found here on KernelTrap. Reaching beyond terabytes, beyond pentabytes, on into exabytes. I feel this sudden discontent with my meager 60 gigabyte hard drive..."

Comments

Testing

[Rick the Red]

The thought of generating the test files is mind-boggling. Unless you work at CERN, where they probably have 16T files just lying around...

Brain Contents

[dscottj]

I seem to recall reading, probably in a science fiction book, that the human brain is thought to store somewhere in the neighborhood of ~2-4 terabytes of information.

Aside from all sorts of quantum fiddly bit problems, I wonder just how long it will be before we can store the state of every neuron in a brain (doesn't have to be human, at least not at first) on a hard drive.

Of course, then what would you do with it?

Files that big

[Alien54]

I can see certain high resolution videos getting this large.

but I worry about other data types.

For example, I grumple at the MS stupidity of putting all datafiles into one large container file in a database base under Access in Windows. Which is why I never use it. I prefer discrete files. If one gets hosed, then it is easier to fix.

obviously a database that is that big would run into other performance issues as well. Some of which is handled by moore's law, and some of which isn't.

for similar reasons I tend to divided my drive into various partitions, regardless of which OS I use.

Trademark infringement

[Webmoth]

Looks like we'll have to come up with a different naming scheme. Someone's already trademarked the exabyte.

Couldn't it weaken the trademark to have Western Digital or Seagate making a '9 exabyte' hard drive? Or HP or Sony making an 'exabyte-class' tape drive? Wouldn't a judge find (in favor of Exabyte) that the consumer would easily be confused?

*The USPTO are idiots.*