Helmut Hullen <hul...@t-online.de> schrieb: >> If I want to manage a complete disk with btrfs, what's the "Best >> Practice"? Would it be best to create the btrfs filesystem on >> "/dev/sdb", or would it be better to create just one partition from >> start to end and then do "mkfs.btrfs /dev/sdb1"? > >> Would the same recomendation hold true, if we're talking about huge >> disks, like 4TB or so? > > I've tested both versions on a 3 disk bundle of 3 TByte disks (data > raid0, meta raid1). > > mkfs.btrfs ... /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd > > made some more problems, especially when recognizing or deleting the > disk(s). Maybe that's a problem more related to "util-linux" (especially > "wipefs" and "blkid"). > > Partitioning first with gdisk and then > > mkfs.btrfs ... /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 > > runs better (perhaps without problems).
I can only second that experience. Most apps and utilities do not expect filesystems on raw partitions, most expect partitions first. Some may even just destroy your filesystem because they only find what appears junk to them on the disk. OP is not going to dual-boot (which would raise such problems with the highest chance) but if you want to evade unexpected behavior use GPT partitioning - it supports huge disks and takes care on the block alignment. I used formatting raw disks in a VM because adding new disks was a matter of adding a new VD image to the machine and I didn't need more than one partition on a disk. But that created more headache than I expected and I didn't want to persuade tools and scripts any longer to accept raw disks as filesystems and work around ugly quirks (like scripts expecting /dev/sd[a-z] to never be a filesystem but always raw device, and requiring /dev/sd[a-z] [0-9]+ for partitions, and more such fun). So I suggest: Go with partitions. Regards, Kai -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
