January 26, 201115 yr One of the things in order to support 3TB and larger HDs is the need to replace the current motherboard BIOS with UEFI. Such motherboards were virtually nonexistent just a few weeks ago but with the launch of the new Intel CPUs many of the new socket 1155 motherboards are coming with UEFI. One interesting observation is that the size of the flash memory where UEFI is stored is now much larger - 4 MBytes to 8 MBytes. The older BIOSes were limited to 1 MBytes in size but I believe some of the newer Intel based motherboards (socket 1156) use 2 MBytes BIOS flash images. However with quick browsing I was not able to find any AMD based motherboard with a larger flash. Quick conclusion - it looks like we can forget the 3TB and larger drives with the current motherboards unless the firmware designers perform a miracle. For someone planning on a new system - perhaps it will be worthwhile to wait for Unraid 5 release and to see if these new socket 1155 boards are fully supported. This is just a very quick observation and I will be glad if someone proves me wrong.
January 27, 201115 yr What you're posting about 3TB actually applied to larger than 2.1 TB drives. There are some 2.5 TB drives out there. The UEFI may only be needed for booting from > 2.1TB drives. This is because BIOS does not know how to handle GPT+ instead of MBR. Older boards may support > 2.1TB drives if the SATA controller can handle it. You could use them as data drives, just not as a boot drive.
January 27, 201115 yr In other words, UEFI is not an issue for unRAID support of large disks. What IS a requirement, is that unRAID recognize and support GPT drives in addition to MBR drives.
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