[OpenIndiana-discuss] Harddisk > 2TB

[Sašo Kiselkov]

On 01/20/2013 04:40 PM, Ulrich Hagen wrote:
> 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.

It indeed appears to be a hard limit of the LSI SAS 1068e chip, no newer
firmware appears to fix this issue (which is bizarre, but I suppose LSI
also knows how to force customers to upgrade). I suggest you pick up any
one of the widely available LSI SAS 2008-based cards out there - in
general, OEM cards tend to be cheaper than LSI-original ones, despite
running the same hardware and being reflashable to LSI firmware. See
http://www.servethehome.com/lsi-sas-2008-raid-controller-hba-information/ for
a list of suitable candidates. I personally prefer Dell's PERC H200 -
essentially a pure LSI 9211-8i, no reflashing needed, JBOD support and
runs like a champ under OI.

>> 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.

Nope, they don't. What you're hitting is a bug in ZFS which incorrectly
handles Advanced Format drives. I have the same kind of drive with the
same formatting and my pools are ashift=13, because I created them with
the patched zpool command from Illumos source. If possible, I recommend
you re-create your pool with the correct ashift - it is possible.

Cheers,
--
Saso