October 25, 201312 yr The motherboard in my Unraid server is a Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H, which is 3 years old. I'm thinking about upgrading from Unraid 4.7 to 5.0 which I believe supports 3TB+ drives. Does anyone know if my motherboard will support 3TB+ drives too? The info I found: "Does unRAID support 3TB and larger drives? Yes, in the later 5.0beta series. (It was initially added in 5.0beta6.) Note that your disk controller must also support drives larger than 2.2TB. (many do, some do not)" http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQ#Does_unRAID_support_3TB_and_larger_drives.3F ^ Not sure if my disk controller supports 3TB drives. The board's chipsets are: North Bridge AMD 890GX, South Bridge AMD SB850, SATA 6Gb/s x6 "If you want to BOOT from a 3T drive, UEFI is definitely required. But unRAID boots from a USB flashdisk, so booting is not the issue. Using 3T drives as data disks is not an issue for non-UEFI BIOSes. Most modern and even older motherboards and controllers DO support 3T data drives. ... The problem is that unRAID does not currently support the GPT partitions necessary to make full use of 3T drives (but you can downsize them to 2.2T for now, and will be able to upsize them by the add'l 800G once 3T support is in unRAID" http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=12728.0 ^ This suggests that 3TB drives will be ok but not all of 3TB is usable, but the post is a couple years old and I assume the full 3TB can be used by Unraid as of 5.0 release (please correct me if I'm wrong).
October 25, 201312 yr Without being able to say 100% for sure, I am pretty confident that you won't have any problem. My board is one generation back from yours (GA-MA790GP-UD4H) and supports 3TB+ drives without issue inside the unraid array. Booting from those drives with this board may be an issue, but as you mentioned, you are booting from the usb key.
October 25, 201312 yr My GA-785GPMT-UD2H works just fine with 3TB Reds. You shouldn't have an issue with a newer board.
October 25, 201312 yr As noted, the previous generation board support > 2TB drives, so I'm sure yours does as well. Be sure you have the most recent BIOS -- the original BIOS may not have proper AHCI support for the larger drives (this is common). But with the most recent BIOS there's virtually no doubt the board will support the drives. If any doubt, just buy one drive, connect it, boot to the BIOS, and confirm it shows the proper size.
October 25, 201312 yr Actually the bios doesn't need to show the right size. Mine shows 1.8T I believe(ancient Asus P5LD2 MB) but they are recognized as 4TB in unraid.
October 26, 201312 yr Agree -- the OS can work with the larger drives even if the BIOS doesn't support it. But if you ever need to run any 3rd party disk utilities; partition managers; recovery utilities; etc. they're far more likely to work correctly if the BIOS is reporting the correct size. Since it's almost certain that the BIOS WILL report the correct size if it's the most current version, it's a good idea to update it.
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