[OpenIndiana-discuss] HP Proliant Microserver N54L Upgrade

[Reginald Beardsley]

This is generally about the USB problem, but I had problems w/ 512 emulation both with the Toshiba and
with an HGST RMA that replaced a 512 drive w/ a 4k drive.  The HGST is in my S10_u8 box.  I was able to work around S10 by formatting the 3 TB HGST on the NL40. 

FWIW "format -e" will kernel panic S10_u8 w/ the  4k sector HGST disk installed.

A few more breadcrumbs:

After I built out the N40L (4x2TB) I tried to use the Toshiba but had  problems w/ the zpool alignment. which are recorded in /var/adm/messages.  However, somewhere along the line that stopped.  Unfortunately, I don't find any work files from when I was doing this.  This was as much as 2 years ago, so I don't remember much besides the pain.

There are entries in sd.conf for the Toshiba which specifies it as 4k.  On this system I've got this:

sd-config-list = "*Toshiba*" ,"physical-block-size:4096";

but on the N40L this:

sd-config-list = "Toshiba External USB 3.0" ,"physical-block-size:4096"; 

 Now that I think about it, I believe that what I found was that the string parser for sd.conf was badly written and did not behave as expected or suggested by the code comments.  I know that I read through the code and discussed w/ Klimov at some length.

If Linux did something to the Toshiba to make it behave, it was probably Fedora 13, but I can't be sure.  I've got a system w/ a drive socket and a couple dozen system disks (including Plan 9 ;-)  in caddies.  I've also got an Ubuntu 10.4 LTS disk I might have used.  I'm quite cavalier about stomping on distros I don't like/use, so almost anything is possible.  However, I suspect Linux had nothing to do with solving the problem.  I only mention it because of the propensity for it to follow the Microsoft model of "helping" you w/o asking permission.

The N40L has been shutdown for a long time, so I'm running scrubs.

To summarize:

Read the advanced format disk page and especially  George Wilson's discussion about 512e and 4k drives and add an appropriate sd.conf entry.  I *think* that's probably what was needed to make it work. Be aware that the string match code for processing sd.conf is pretty flaky and does not do what you'd expect. 

The blank partition table reported by format(1m) troubles me.  There may be some other fiddle needed.  Klimov and I tried to document this stuff, but the pages look pretty different from the last time I looked at them closely and this is all I can remember at the moment.

Have Fun!
Reg

--------------------------------------------
On Mon, 2/16/15, Volker A. Brandt <vab at bb-c.de> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] HP Proliant Microserver N54L Upgrade
 To: "Reginald Beardsley" <pulaskite at yahoo.com>, "Discussion list for OpenIndiana" <openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>
 Cc: "Andrew Gabriel" <illumos at cucumber.demon.co.uk>
 Date: Monday, February 16, 2015, 10:15 AM
 
 Reg:
 
 > Sadly, I think it's more complicated,
 but that might be it.  I had
 > lots of
 fun w/ the sector size reporting.
 [...]
 
 Your sad
 story is about connecting via USB, right?  The OP (Harry)
 
 wanted to replace internal disks with
 bigger ones.  I think your 
 problems would
 not apply to his use case.  Correct?
 
 FWIW we are using 4x 4TB 4k sector disks in an
 ashift=12 pool in an
 N54L without any
 problems.  The boot disk is a 128GB SSD, so well 
 below the 2GB boundary.  It's OmniOS but
 that should not make any
 difference
 whatsoever.
 
 
 Regards -- Volker
 -- 
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