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

[Jonathan Cox]

Certainly, SATA supports >2TB because it supports 48-bit LBA. However, the issue is that most (if not all) PCI-X SATA/SAS HBA cards that are compatible with the sun4u architecture do not support >2TB for SATA. However, there is a particular model of LSI SAS HBA that can be flashed with the proper firmware to support SAS drives >2TB. It still won't support SATA drives >2TB. It's clearly a limitation of the firmware, as they discuss how the RAID code (and presumably the SATA code) is written using 32-bit algorithms that don't support >2TB. But for SAS non-RAID, they must be using the proper 64-bit algorithms.

LSI has a summary of the issue in the attached PDF.

I don't know if the LSI HBA cards and/or Solaris 10 has issues with 4k sector hard drives. In theory, if everything is implemented to spec, then I believe it should work. But that's usually a poor assumption.

-----Original Message-----
From: geeks <geeks-bounces at sunhelp.org> On Behalf Of Mouse via geeks
Sent: Saturday, July 6, 2024 21:53
To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
Cc: Mouse <mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG>
Subject: Re: [geeks] 14 TB Hard Drive in Sun Blade (procedure)

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

Maybe that hardware's implementation of SATA.  But SATA per se supports well over 2T; I've got two "6TB" SATA drives (actually about 5.458T; they're 11721045168 half-K interface sectors) in live use right now.

> Also, most newer hard disks support 4K sectors, as opposed to the old 
> standard of 512 byte sectors.

My experience is that they often (usually, in that size range) have 4K medium sectors, but they present an interface with half-K sectors, doing RMW cycles internally as necessary.  The "6TB" drives I mentioned above are examples:

wd2 at atabus2 drive 0: <ST6000DM003-2U9186>
wd2: drive supports 16-sector PIO transfers, LBA48 addressing
wd2: HPA enabled, no protected area
wd2: 5589 GB, 11628021 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 11721045168 sectors
wd2: 32-bit data port
wd2: drive supports PIO mode 4, DMA mode 2, Ultra-DMA mode 6 (Ultra/133)
wd2: block sizes: medium 4096, interface 512, alignment 0

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

_______________________________________________
GEEKS:  http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/geeks_sunhelp.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: S11196_v1.0_Support_for_Drives_Greater_than_2_TB_for_SAS1_IT_IR_Products.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 150771 bytes
Desc: S11196_v1.0_Support_for_Drives_Greater_than_2_TB_for_SAS1_IT_IR_Products.pdf
URL: <http://sunhelp.org/pipermail/geeks_sunhelp.org/attachments/20240707/0ed61414/attachment-0001.pdf>