FreeBSD and extremely large volumes

[Alex Hoff]

Hi, 

We have a FreeBSD 4.7 system with an Adaptec 2200S RAID controller and 14 x
140 gig IBM drives. We have run in to an issue that when all drives are
combined into a single volume, the OS can't handle the large number of
sectors. Since the RAID controller sets the sector size to 512, and we can
not change that, the total number of sectors in our system is between 2^31
and 2^32. Well utilities such as fdisk use a signed integer and here in lies
the problem, the total number of sectors is now negative. Oops. To make
things worse, as soon as 300 gig drives become available, we will have 14 x
300 which will result in the number of sectors > 2^32, thus overflowing the
int. 

I am sure that someone else has a setup with such a large amount of storage.
What have these people done to overcome this limitation? Since we can't
change the sector size, what other tricks can we use? Keeping the drive as a
single volume is required for the intended application. 

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Alex Hoff
ahoff at sandvine.com