<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 15 (filtered medium)">
<style><!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:"Cambria Math";
panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;}
@font-face
{font-family:Aptos;}
@font-face
{font-family:"Segoe UI";
panose-1:2 11 5 2 4 2 4 2 2 3;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0in;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif;
mso-ligatures:standardcontextual;}
a:link, span.MsoHyperlink
{mso-style-priority:99;
color:#467886;
text-decoration:underline;}
span.EmailStyle17
{mso-style-type:personal-compose;
font-family:"Aptos",sans-serif;
color:windowtext;}
.MsoChpDefault
{mso-style-type:export-only;}
@page WordSection1
{size:8.5in 11.0in;
margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in;}
div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}
--></style><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:shapedefaults v:ext="edit" spidmax="1026" />
</xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:shapelayout v:ext="edit">
<o:idmap v:ext="edit" data="1" />
</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]-->
</head>
<body lang="EN-US" link="#467886" vlink="#96607D" style="word-wrap:break-word">
<div class="WordSection1">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE">Hey all,<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE">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.</span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414"><br>
<br>
<span style="background:#FEFEFE">See this note from LSI on >2TB disk support: </span></span><a href="https://www.supermicro.com/support/faqs/data_lib/S11196_v1.0_Support_for_Drives_Greater_than_2_TB_for_SAS1_IT_IR_Products.pdf" target="_blank"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#2577B1;background:#FEFEFE;text-decoration:none">https://www.supermicro.com/support/...Greater_than_2_TB_for_SAS1_IT_IR_Products.pdf</span></a><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE">First, you must flash the latest<b> IT (initiator target)</b> 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.</span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414">
<span style="background:#FEFEFE">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...<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE"><a href="https://www.microconnectors.com/0-5m-sas-controller-backplane-sff-8484-to-4-sas-sff-8482-with-power-cable/">https://www.microconnectors.com/0-5m-sas-controller-backplane-sff-8484-to-4-sas-sff-8482-with-power-cable/</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE">Second, you must use a SAS drive, as SATA only supports 2 TB.</span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414"><br>
<br>
<span style="background:#FEFEFE">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.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE"><a href="https://www.ebay.com/itm/375305663621">https://www.ebay.com/itm/375305663621</a><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE">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.</span><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414"><br>
<br>
<span style="background:#FEFEFE">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.</span><br>
<br>
<span style="background:#FEFEFE">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.</span><br>
<br>
<span style="background:#FEFEFE">I've been using this drive as a backup storage NAS on my Blade for my LTO-5 tape drive without any issues.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.5pt;font-family:"Segoe UI",sans-serif;color:#141414;background:#FEFEFE">-Jonathan</span><o:p></o:p></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>