[OpenIndiana-discuss] Harddisk > 2TB

[Ulrich Hagen]

Sašo Kiselkov wrote:

> 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.

As I wrote in my original e-mail, that is exactly my plan. Not with
the PERC H200, but with an IBM ServeRAID M1015, which is mentioned in
the page you sent the link to. My question was, if this controller
will accept the disks as my current Intel controller left them, and
keep the data intact. Then I would rely on the autoexpand property of
the pool to use the additional space.

> >> 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.

Hm, as far as I recollect the discussions about this topic, the
statement was: If only these disks would not lie about their
blocksize, OI (or rather ZFS) would do the correct thing and set up
the ashift to 12 automatically.

But anyway, recreating the pool is currently out of the question for
me. I will just have to live with ashift=9.
BTW: If someone comes up with a tool that can change ashift on the
fly, I would be most interested. Not that I expect that to happen ...

Greetings
Ulrich