Create filesystems greater than 2 Terabytes

CentOS/RHEL 5 supports filesystems up to 8 TB, with support for 16 TB planned for the future. In practice, however, you may only be able to create a 2 TB filesystem instead of the advertised 8 TB. The following procedure lets you create an 8 TB filesystem as announced by Red Hat. This example assumes LVM. First, create the PV and name it BiggerGroup with the following commands.

# pvcreate /dev/sda
# vgcreate BiggerGroup /dev/sda

Next, create an LV named biggervol from BiggerGroup.

# lvcreate -L 16000G -n biggervol BiggerGroup

Next, format the filesystem. This step is important: include -F and set the block size to 4096, as shown below.

# mkfs.ext3 -F -b 4096 /dev/BiggerGroup/biggervol