January 21, 201313 yr Hello all, I recent sent back two Western Digital 2 TB drives (WD20EARS) that were reporting read errors, and they're sending me back two 3 TB drives (WD30EZRX) since I guess they didn't have any of the 2 TB drives available. At first I'm thinking "woohoo" and then I remembered two things: 1) I'm still on Unraid 4.7 (I can upgrade to 5.0, so that's not a huge deal). 2) My motherboard SATA controller probably isn't going to support the 3.0 TB size, but I'm not 100% sure. Is there a list of SATA controllers floating around that for sure can handle the 3 TB drives? I've done some looking and searching, and saw the Hardware Compatibility page on the wiki, but it makes no mention of drive capacities. The motherboard I'm running is an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum, which has 8 on-board SATA ports -- 4 from the nForce4 Ultra chipset, and the other 4 from an on-board Silicon Image Sil3114. I know that to use these drives in my array, I'll need to do the upgrade to 5.0. My question is -- if my motherboard just happens to be able to support and detect these drives at their correct size, can I still hook them up to my system and do a pre-clear before I do the upgrade?
January 21, 201313 yr My question is -- if my motherboard just happens to be able to support and detect these drives at their correct size, can I still hook them up to my system and do a pre-clear before I do the upgrade? You should still be able to operate and preclear the drive. although some of the tools to put the partition may not be there in 4.7. I'm not sure. You will not be able to add them to the array unless you upgrade or decide to set a HPA and make the 3TB drive look like a 2TB drive.
January 21, 201313 yr Author Thanks. I definitely won't be adding them to the array until I get up to 5.0+. I might just download Unraid 5.0 to another USB stick and boot up on another system (if I can find one) to pre-clear the drives, just to be safe.
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