Hard Drive 3TB recognized as 2TB


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I have had Unraid 4.5.3 running virtually untouched for a few years with 12 hard drives and 12.5 TB of storage.

 

I was running out of space so decided it was time to replace a couple of the smaller hard drives. I was able to get a couple of 3TB Toshiba hard drives from a friend that was upgrading.

 

My current parity drive was a 2TB Hitachi so I knew that I needed to replace that first. When I installed the 3TB in that location and turned on the server it recognized the hard drive as a 2TB. I did some reading and thought it was possible that version 4.5.3 did not support greater than a 2TB hard drive. I then upgraded the server to version 6.0.1.

 

After the successful upgrade I installed the 3TB hard drive and it was recognized correctly as 3TB. Over two days it did a parity check and everything looked correct. Once it complete I thought everything was good but wanted to wait a few days before replacing the other drives. A day later the power happened to go out and when it checked the parity on boot up the verification failed. It was now recognizing the 3TB with the same serial number as 2TB. I had it run the parity again and it completed correctly though only recognizing the same hard drive a 2TB. Once it completed I decided to run the parity check again. It failed as it recognized the drive now as 3TB.

 

It appears that I do not have a protected array as every time the parity is run it will flip between recognizing the same drive as either a 3TB or 2TB.

 

Has this happened to anyone else? Should I just give up with these drives?

 

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

 

Thank you. 

 

 

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What make/model is your motherboard and any add-in SATA controllers ??

 

You likely are using controllers that don't support drives > 2TB  (bypassing the native controller firmware can still let them work with the larger drives ... which is likely why you saw 3TB okay until the next reboot)

 

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Update:

 

I ran a parity check twice over the past couple days and each time the parity drive showed up as 3TB with no errors. I figured it was safe to replace the smallest 250GB drive with another 3TB since it appeared that the problem had went away.

 

I physically replaced disk 9 with another of the same brand 3TB drives and when it booted up the parity drive was recognized as a 2TB drive that was "wrong". Its the same serial number so I'm still experiencing the problem.

 

I attached a copy of the diagnostic report.

 

- I don't believe its a sata port issue but I'm using 4 ports on a Gigabye GA81945-PL-G with two 4 port PCI cards for a total of 12 drives. I can get the brands of the cards if that might be the problem.

- I originally thought it was the old version of unraid but I upgraded that first so I know that's not the issue.

 

Any more thoughts. I'm thinking of trying the second 3TB hard drive I have as the parity. The only problem is that drive is also recognized as 2TB right now so it probably has the same issue.

 

tower-diagnostics-20150820-2059.zip

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This board features the ICH7 southbridge, which I believe means that you'll run into the 2TB volume limit.

 

I don't think so. Look HERE. It shows that ICH5 and ICH7 does support the larger drives. I have testing ICH8 and ICH10 and know they both work. I would be very surprised if ICH7 did not support >2T drives, excect for booting without UEFI BIOS.

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