[NTLUG:Discuss] Which filesystem & partitioning for a 9Terabyte volume?

[Leroy Tennison]

Ralph Green wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-01-28 at 09:51 -0600, Richard wrote:
>> So what should I do now with eight 1.5TB drives and an 8-port 3ware 
>> controller (and either Slackware 12.2 or OpenSuse 11.1)? 
>>
>  Howdy,
>   I like the fact that you have 8 1.5 gig drives and you expect 9 gig
> total.  I hope that means you are thinking RAID-6 and not RAID-5.  I
> read a paper Robert Pearson posted a while back that talked about this.
> Given the size drives we have today, a single drive failure could cause
> a RAID-5 to not be recoverable.  The author recommended RAID-6.
>  I think some 3ware controllers natively handle RAID-6.  Which card did
> you get?
> Good day,
> Ralph
> 
> 
> 
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> 

I don't understand something about a statement you made: Given the size 
drives we have today, a single drive failure could cause a RAID-5 to not 
be recoverable.

My understanding is that given N drives (where N must be at least 3) you 
  "consume" the equivalent of one drive spreading the redundancy data 
across all drives.  Assuming all drives are equal size, how is losing a 
small drive recoverable but losing a big drive not?