September 28, 201312 yr Hi folks, Before I go through the long process that will be preclear on a new 4TB WD Red drive I'd just like to confirm that it will be properly recognized. My Mobo is an ASRock P4i945GC, relatively old tech. 8 of my drives (7+1) parity are connected to the Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8, and I use 2 of the Mobo SATA connectors for the cache and a "spare" preclearing slot. (10 bays in the server). I know that I could juggle the slots and the 4TB will work on the SM card. When I booted up the machine with the 4TB attached to the Mobo I went into the BIOS and saw that it was reported as a Size of 1801.8, which is a little weird. Anyway, when I got into Unraid preclear and smart both report 4TB. I have a mix of 2TB and 1TB drives right now, and the 4TB will initially go into the parity slot which is attached to the SM, so I'm sure that will be fine, but will I have to shuffle the HDDs in the slots to put the preclear on the SM as well. It would be nice not to, but not the end of the world. I'd end up with 1 drive and the cache that could never go to 4TB (without another SATA card anyway, maybe in the PCIe X1 slot). Is there any definitive way proving whether the drive is being recognised as "full" value, short of preclearing and seeing how far it will get in terms of TB? The preclear will take a very long time so I'd prefer not to waste that time only to find it only does 2TB or something.
September 28, 201312 yr Since unRAID is reporting the correct value it is fine. The BIOS can only see drives up to 1801.8 but the OS doesn't have this limitation.
September 29, 201312 yr The BIOS can only see drives up to 1801.8 :) Actually this indicates the BIOS can only see drives up to 2TB (2.2TB in "diisk-drive-maker-ese") The 1801.8 is the residual space caused by using a 4TB drive => technically it's 4TB modulo 2TB (i.e. the remainder after dividing 4TB by 2TB) But I agree that if Linux is seeing the correct size, it's okay to use it, since that means the controller itself can support it -- just not the BIOS
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