Ask Slashdot: How Reliable are Enormous Filesystems in Linux?

Josh Beck submitted this interesting question:"Hello. We're currently using a Mylex PG card and a pile of disks to run a 120 GB RAID5 under Linux. After some minor firmware issues with the Mylex (which their tech support acknowledged and fixed right away!) , we've got a very stable filesystem with a good amount of storage. My question, though, is how far will Linux and e2fs go before something breaks? Is anyone currently using e2fs and Linux to run a 500+ GB filesystem? "

Josh continues... "I have plenty of faith in Linux (over half our servers are Linux, most of the rest are FreeBSD), but am concerned that few people have likely attempted to use such a large FS under Linux...the fact that our 120 GB FS takes something like 3 minutes to mount is a bit curious as well, but hey, how often do you reboot a Linux box?"