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

[Reginald Beardsley]

Martin,

You can't use format(1m) for USB drives in Solaris 10 up to at least u8. I've never tried u9 because of the license change. I'd certainly agree about rmformat(1) however, format(1m) does not see flash drives even on OI 151a.

I see that format(1m) does see USB HDDs on OI 151a which is encouraging.  For me that's a dual core Atom nettop I use for internet access only.  That's not where I do serious work.  It's where I evaluate OI and surf. I can live w/ failure on it.

When OI reaches the point I feel it is stable and robust enough to replace Solaris 10 u8 I'll transition the Z400 off Solaris 10.  But for now I don't think we're there.  Making progress to be sure.  I've been very encouraged by your Sparc work. I very much prefer Sparc, but because I do heavy floating point work, I've been forced on to the x86 which I despise.  

I never said anything about what you do.  I have merely reported my experience. I've read your posts on your Sparc work w/ great interest, but I don't recall ever commenting about them.

As for "lots of moving parts" it's an American idiom for complexity.

Reg


--- On Fri, 9/28/12, Martin Bochnig <martin at martux.org> wrote:

> From: Martin Bochnig <martin at martux.org>
> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Seagate 3000GB Drive only shows 746GB
> To: "Discussion list for OpenIndiana" <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>
> Date: Friday, September 28, 2012, 4:58 PM
> On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 11:15 PM,
> Reginald Beardsley
> <pulaskite at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > There are at least 3 issues here:
> >
> > 1) USB drives can't use format(1m).  The man page
> for rmformat(1m) suggests it will create an EFI label for
> disks over 1 TB, but it doesn't appear to work.  See
> below.
> 
> 
> Never use rmformat.
> And it is baseless nonsense, that USB drives don't work with
> format.
> Who claims that? A man page ?? Yes, I recall that I also
> read that
> nonsense long ago.
> Just don't believe it. It has no meaning.
> 
> 
> 
> > 2) The USB mass storage driver may not handle disks
> over 1 TB.  I know that was the case w/ Sol 10 u7 when
> I tried to use a 1.5 TB USB disk. In that case, Solaris
> simply refused to see the device at all even though Linux
> and Windows did.
> 
> 
> I use 10 distict drives in ZFS mirrors, and each of these
> drives is at
> least 1TB in size, most are 1.5TB and 2TB.
> These drives are mostly from Samsung, but also include
> Seagate and WD.
> They are organized in simple 1:1 ZFS mirrors.
> You say I dreamt it, that I use them since 2008?
> From 2008 to 2010 I even thought, let me be smart and save
> power. For
> this reason I used 2 FSC Amilo Laptops (one with AMD, the
> other with
> Intel) and I sold the internal 2.5" SATA hdds and
> exclusively used
> external USB 3.5" storage, which I even used as boot disks
> with
> rpools.
> PowerMangament was an instability factor, so rem_drv pm as
> always, and
> that's it.
> No need to configure power.conf etc  ...
> But the overall performace and cooling of these Laptops was
> bad.
> Therefore I eventually gave up that idea.
> 
> I dreamt all that?
> 
> 
> 
> >
> > 3) As noted, the USB/SATA interface in the enclosure
> may not handle disks over 1 TB.  A more recent
> enclosure should solve that problem.
> 
> 
> More recent is not always the solution, as the Lindy example
> has shown.
> Just try different bridges, until you find one that works
> (while most
> should meanwhile!).
> 
> 
> > If the disk came in the enclosure, then it should work
> and it's probably a driver issue.
> >
> > As an experiment I hooked up the Hitachi drive I'm
> about to RMA because of SMART warnings about sector
> reallocation via a USB<->SATA adaptor.
> 
> 
> [SNIP]
> 
> 
> > I can't say where the problem lies, but because the
> disk works via a SATA connection but not via USB, I think
> it's somewhere in the USB<->SATA chain. 
> Unfortunately that has lots of moving parts :-(
> 
> 
> Huh??
> 
> 
> 
> 
> --
> rgds.
>    %martin bochnig
> 
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