Portable Hard Drive - 2tb

just wondering whether or not, as i heard something that beyond a certain amount of terabytes for one drive linux can't read it or something, whether or not suse linux would be ok with a portable hard drive i'm looking to get, a 2TB default format NTFS.

will it be ok? i should be ok on the read/write situation as i have ntfs-3g.

any suggestions/thoughts much appreciated.

should be o.k. i have a 1tb nas & i formatted it to ext3 no problems for me

Andy

should be o.k. i have a 1tb nas & i formatted it to ext3 no problems for me

Andy
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yeh i have a 1tb drive (fat32 though, and nearly full!). thinking of formatting the 2tb drive to ext3 as i did with one my old portable hdd's. it makes the capacity go down however, how come? and also... what is the 'lost and found' locked folder that is always made in an ext3 partition??

thanks andy, and for the very very speedy response!!

edit: also, do you know the max file size for an ext3 file system? fat32 is 4gb, what is ntfs also if you know?

cheers mate.

edit again! found this

Ext3 can support files up to 1TB. With a 2.4 kernel the filesystem size is limited by the maximal block device size, which is 2TB. In 2.6 the maximum (32-bit CPU) limit is of block devices is 16TB, but ext3 supports only up to 4TB.

so my kernel it can support up to 16TB, but ext3 can only support 4TB, but this is fine i guess as it's only a 2TB drive.

yep & well done in finding the answer, saved me a bit of head-scratching to remember

Andy

In regards to capacity the file structure is allocated some space I believe at the time of making it you can change this. iirc ext3 allocates 5% which on large drives is a little overkill.

Try man mkfs.ext3 think its the -m flag, not really something I play with so can't really give advice.

lost&found I believe are created for/when you fsck, for recovery.

As far as i can remember when using ext3 it reserves 5% (by default) only usable for user root. Normally you can change this to 0% with tune2fs, when you think you don't need this (on a root partition this normally make sense).

for creating lost+found you can use mklost+found . don't know wather it's created when fsck it's running.

Hope this helps

As far as i can remember when using ext3 it reserves 5% (by default) only usable for user root. Normally you can change this to 0% with tune2fs, when you think you don't need this (on a root partition this normally make sense).

for creating lost+found you can use mklost+found . don't know wather it's created when fsck it's running.

Hope this helps
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thanks for this post. i ran tune2fs and found the -m option was likely what i need, so i type tune2fs -m and it said option requires an argument. how do i tell it which volume i want to change and to what percentage.

thanks in advance,

Ross.

edit: also how would i delete the lost and found thing, presumably as it does it automatically trying to delete it bu su to root and typing rm /....lost&found won't work. would it?

thanks.

thanks for this post. i ran tune2fs and found the -m option was likely what i need, so i type tune2fs -m and it said option requires an argument. how do i tell it which volume i want to change and to what percentage.[/b]

tune2fs -m 0 /dev/somepartition

edit: also how would i delete the lost and found thing, presumably as it does it automatically trying to delete it bu su to root and typing rm /....lost&found won't work. would it?

thanks.
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rm -rf lost+found

Hi,

run tune2fs -m <percentage> <partition>

for example:
tune2fs -m 3 /dev/sda1

it is recommend to unmount the partition before using tune2fs.

with dumpe2fs -h <partition> (or tune2fs -l) you can check the current settings for an ext3 partition (Reserved block count).

The reserved blocks are also used to avoid defragmentation so it could be better not to eliminate it completly

hope this helps

ok thank you both microchip and monex.

will buy the drive next week i think and reduce the reserve to 1% or so, as this is still 20gb (well, will more likely be 18 or so) which is surely plenty. cheers guys.