[geeks] 14 TB Hard Drive in Sun Blade (procedure)

[Jonathan Cox]

Hey all,

I just wanted to say hello and mention that I was able to get a 14 TB SAS hard drive working in my Sun Blade 2500 workstation with Solaris 10 SPARC. This might help others out if you are looking for storage >2TB in a sun4u. I thought this was pretty cool since most of what I read online said it was impossible. However, there were a few hoops to jump through. One trick is to use an LSI SAS3080X-R PCI-X card as the SCSI host bus adapter with the proper firmware.

See this note from LSI on >2TB disk support: https://www.supermicro.com/support/...Greater_than_2_TB_for_SAS1_IT_IR_Products.pdf<https://www.supermicro.com/support/faqs/data_lib/S11196_v1.0_Support_for_Drives_Greater_than_2_TB_for_SAS1_IT_IR_Products.pdf>

First, you must flash the latest IT (initiator target) firmware v1.33 (Phase 21) on the SAS3080X-R. This disables RAID, which has a 2TB limit since it is written with 32-bit math. I used an old Super Micro x86 workstation with 3.3V PCI-X slots to do the flash using LSI's "sasflash.exe", but it may be possible with "raidctl" directly in Solaris. I wasn't brave enough to try, although these cards are only about $15 on eBay...
https://www.microconnectors.com/0-5m-sas-controller-backplane-sff-8484-to-4-sas-sff-8482-with-power-cable/

Second, you must use a SAS drive, as SATA only supports 2 TB.

Also, most newer hard disks support 4K sectors, as opposed to the old standard of 512 byte sectors. I don't know if the SAS3080X-R supports 4K sectors, but I would bet probably not. It would be interesting to know if somebody wants to try. Therefore, I used the Toshiba MG07SCA14TE 14TB 7.2K 3.5" SAS 12Gb/s Enterprise drive, which uses 512 byte sector emulation (-E model). This is a helium filled server drive that doesn't use much power or give off much heat either.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/375305663621

Keep in mind, some of the "SAS" cables sold on Amazon are not actually SAS cables, but SATA. The true SAS cable is compatible with both SAS and SATA.

Since a 14TB hard drive has about 27,343,750,000 sectors, I found that doing a "probe-scsi-all" from the OpenBoot prompt (Open Boot 4.17.1) will actually crash OpenBoot, probably because the number of sectors overflows the variable (uint32_t?) in the OpenBoot code! Since a uint32 has a maximum value of 4,294,967,295, this would mean OpenBoot can only probe a hard disk with a maximum capacity of 2.199 TB (assuming 512 byte sectors). However, everything does still work fine in the OS.

Lastly, to achieve >2TB support, you need to "label" (partition) the disk with EFI, not Sun's proprietary SMI format. To do this, use 'format -e' from a terminal and select the "EFI" label.

I've been using this drive as a backup storage NAS on my Blade for my LTO-5 tape drive without any issues.

-Jonathan
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