HDDs larger than 16TB

[peteru]

As larger drives appear on the market, you may be tempted to install a very large HDD. This should work without any issues with HDDs up to 16TB in size. It should also be possible to install and use a HDD larger than 16TB.

However, be aware that the ext4 file system utilities, such as e2fsck, have some issues on 32-bit systems when the number of blocks overflows a 32-bit quantity. The Linux kernel does not appear to have such an issue. Under normal use, drives larger than 16TB are unlikely to present a problem, but if there is a need to perform data recovery due to file system corruption or drive faults, you may run into problems when attempting to do this task on the Beyonwiz itself.

For this reason, I would recommend using drives that are 16TB or smaller when directly attached to a Beyonwiz using SATA or USB. Networked storage does not have this issue and is known to work with volumes 30TB and larger.

If you do end up in a situation where you have an ext4 volume that is larger than 4,294,967,295 * 4,096 = 17,592,186,040,320 bytes, use a 64-bit machine for tasks such as resize2fs or e2fsck.