[OpenIndiana-discuss] Harddisk > 2TB

[Ulrich Hagen]

Jim Klimov wrote:

> On 2013-01-20 13:57, Ulrich Hagen wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > I have recently added an Intel SASUC8I controller to my home file
> > server, and hooked up eight Western Digital Red 3000GB disks to it.
> >
> > Only after I started filling up the new pool I noticed that the
> > capacity of the pool is not what I expected it to be.
> > And really: 'format' lists e. g. one of these disks as
> >    c1t0d0 <ATA-WDC WD30EFRX-68A-0A80-2.00TB>
> 
> As a couple more wild guesses:
> 
> 1) How does (the HBA's) BIOS recognize them? Does it confirm that
> the disks are 3Tb and not mis-marked on paper label? ;)

Now that I looked more closely at the boot (BIOS) messages, I have
noticed that the controller lists these disks as having a capacity of
2047 GB. Also a (too late) search in the internet revealed that 2TB is
the limit of this controller.

> 2) Is it possible that for some reason these disks use an MBR
> partitioning table instead of GPT? The former would max out at 2Tb.

They were and are not partitioned. I took them out of their boxes,
connected them to the controller, started OI and created the pool
using entire disks.

And, to reply to Sašo Kiselkov:
ashift is 9, these disk lie about their native sector size. So my pool
will never be as fast as it could.
And I used the Intel controller without reflashing anything, because
it supports JBOD mode out of the box, which was all that I wanted.

Ulrich