2015-02-10 17:44 GMT+01:00 yary <not....@gmail.com>: > I know FFS2 can handle that size easily, but I'm worried about fsck > taking forever. This machine will have 1.5GB RAM, from what I've read > that's not enough memory to fsck a 4TB volume without painful > swapping. Is there some filesystem-plus-options for recent OpenBSD > that guarantees the disk will always be in a consistent state, even > after a crash, so that fsck won't be necessary? > > You can invent how many journals and whatevers you like to hope to prevent the state from being inconsistent, but broken or breaking sectors will sooner or later force you to run over all files and read/check them, and in that case you will need lots of ram anyhow.
It's nice to have a journal (or intention log or whatever) so that after a random power-off you can see that no writes were ongoing and we can skip some (all?) checks, but when your super critical data is on a disk that is failing, you will need to check it regardless. Fsck "usage" is mostly about the unexpected shutdowns and crashes, but also for the degrading disks to salvage what can be gotten out of it. When the worst happens, shopping for ram sticks in order to get at least 50% of the data out, isn't that fun. -- May the most significant bit of your life be positive.
