&gt; Just creating a filesystem on an 8TB disk takes hours.<p>Are you sure you mean TB?<p><pre><code>    $ for i in $(seq 8); do truncate -s 1T 8tb.$i.img; losetup --find --show 8tb.$i.img; done
    &#x2F;dev&#x2F;loop2
    &#x2F;dev&#x2F;loop3
    &#x2F;dev&#x2F;loop4
    &#x2F;dev&#x2F;loop5
    &#x2F;dev&#x2F;loop6
    &#x2F;dev&#x2F;loop7
    &#x2F;dev&#x2F;loop8
    &#x2F;dev&#x2F;loop9
    $ sudo mdadm --create --level linear -n 8 &#x2F;dev&#x2F;md8 &#x2F;dev&#x2F;loop{2..9}
    mdadm: Defaulting to version 1.2 metadata
    mdadm: array &#x2F;dev&#x2F;md8 started.
    $ sudo time mke2fs &#x2F;dev&#x2F;md8
    [lots of output snipped]
    real    42m0.590s
    user     0m2.470s
    sys      1m0.440s
    $ du -sh . # just for fun
    65G     .
</code></pre>
That&#x27;s certainly not fast, but it&#x27;s not &quot;hours&quot; either. It&#x27;s also a magnetic disk that was actively being used by other processes. Given how much data it wrote, it averaged 25MB&#x2F;s, which is not really that fast. An 8TB SSD would be much faster.