Format ext3 for Many Large Files on RAID

We've already covered how to format a filesystem for many small files. Now we will look at how to format a filesystem for many LARGE files.

Say we have a very big device, as the Linux kernel puts it. For this example, we will assume that it is a 7TB RAID enclosure of direct-attach storage on /dev/sdb. We have already done critical firmware updates. And we have initialized the array for RAID 6 with hot spares, through the controller bios, as one big virtual disk.

First initialize the device as an LVM physical volume, accounting for 128k stripe alignment of our RAID array:
# pvcreate --metadatasize 250k /dev/sdb
# pvs -o pe_start

Create an LVM volume group for the RAID array, and then create the LVM logical volume, using 100% of the volume group:
# vgcreate RaidVolGroup00 /dev/sdb
# lvcreate --extents 100%VG --name \
RaidLogVol00 RaidVolGroup00

Now format the logical volume ext3:
# mkfs -t ext3 -E stride=32 -m 1 \
-O dir_index,filetype,has_journal,sparse_super \
/dev/RaidVolGroup00/RaidLogVol00

I've been told that uping the read_ahead queue can increase performance. YMMV
# echo 1024 >/sys/block/sdb/queue/read_ahead_kb