[OpenIndiana-discuss] Seagate 3000GB Drive only shows 746GB

[Martin Bochnig]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 9:32 PM, Volker A. Brandt <vab at bb-c.de> wrote:

>> This is a USB-attached drive
>> (in a SATA/USB enclosure)
>
> Are you sure the controller chip in your SATA/USB enclosure can
> deal with more than 2TB of disk?
>
> All such enclosures I have either truncate at 2TB or worse, they wrap
> around.  A disk with 3000GB (decimal) will give you just short of
> 2794GB (binary), and wrapped around 2TB will give you 746GB.
>
> So I am quite sure the controller chip in your enclosure is to blame.


Hi all,

I speak from my own experience with 2 3TB WD drives with external
Lindy Quad-bay USB 2.0 enclusure versus in usb-bringes that I removed
from cheap external USB2.0 Seagate drives a few years ago.

While the expensive (140 EUR) "professional" Lindy Quad-bay enclosure
___never___ sees anything beyond 2047GB, the cheap bridges that I
removed from the Seagate plastic drives do see the full capacity.

All that of course after you start format -e  and EFI-label'ing.
Entering C/H/S data was not required in case of the 3TB WD drives,
autodetection worked (but it was absolutely required to start format
with the '-e' option).

However: The USB bridge built into the Lindy enclosure would NEVER
EVER see more than 2047GB, not even after you labeled a disk on the
other bridge and re-connected to Lindy.
With "Lindy" I'm referring tom the original USB2-only version of this:

http://www.lindy.de/quad-drive-sas-sata-multilane-infiniband-sff-8470-desktop-raid-system-terabyte-festplattengehaeuse-fuer-4-hdds/42818.html

which is no longer in production.

For this reason I replaced the internat bridge chip that originally
inside the Lindy, and now it finally works.
BTW there is no difference in this case  between x86_x64 versus SPARC.




--
rgds.
   %martin bochnig