February 2, 201412 yr Until recently, I was running 4.7 Plus with 4x1Tb drives. I got a slickdeal on a WD Red 3TB drive, so I decided to start the process of upgrading my 1TB drives. One area of concern is that my ECS-A740GM-M motherboard is reporting only an 801.6GB hard drive in the BIOS for this new 3TB drive: Size: 801.6GB LBA Mode: Supported Block Mode: 16Sectors PIO Mode: 4 Asynch DMA: Multiword DMA-2 Ultra DMA: Ultra DMA-6 SMART: Supported I am not 100% sure if this board even supports 3TB drives, or if it can with a BIOS upgrade. The latest BIOS posted on the ECS website is from 2010. The current BIOS is dated 2008, I think. Anyway, once I boot up, the unraid server is reporting the full 3TB in fdisk: #fdisk /dev/sde Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sde: 3000.6 GB, 3000592982016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 364801 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disk identifier: 0x7ad08bdb Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System Should I be concerned about the BIOS reporting an 801.6GB drive, even though Linux sees a 3TB drive? Thanks to all the excellent instructions on this site, the upgrade to Unraid 5.0.5 went smoothly. Once done, I followed these steps to upgrade the parity drive: 1 – Ran parity check 2 – Stopped the array 3 – On the devices tab, removed parity drive from configuration 4 – Powered down system via “powerdown” button 5 – Removed existing 1TB parity drive, replaced with new 3TB drive 6 – Powered on unraid 7 – On the devices tab, assigned 3TB drive as parity drive After step 7, I expected to see the customary blue ball next to the parity drive, but what I saw was a red ball, along with a message that seemed to suggest that the system wanted to do a parity upgrade. It showed the new WD drive in the parity slot, with the old 1TB parity drive listed below that (apparently as informational only) with the text "wrong drive" or something similar. At this point, I was not comfortable proceeding, so I backed out and rebooted with my old parity drive. Is this what I should expect to see when I do the parity upgrade? Do you think my hardware is compatible with this larger drive based on what the BIOS is reporting? Maybe this ECS board is incompatible with large drives? Thanks! Larry unraid_syslog.txt
February 2, 201412 yr Author I decided to flash the BIOS and now the WD drive is reported in the BIOS setup as 3TB instead of 801GB. Hurray! I'll try the unraid parity upgrade again and see if it looks any different. Should I still expect to see the traditional blue ball during the parity upgrade, or has that changed for version 5.x?
February 2, 201412 yr I just did this and it did look/act a little differently in the gui. It says "Parity upgrade" since it assumes that is what you are doing, upgrading your parity disk.
February 2, 201412 yr Everything sounds normal. The flash upgrade was not required. But now you can use a large drive as a boot device with the MB. As long as the OS reports the correct size the BIOS doesn't matter.
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