3T drives showing up as 2.2T

[Preston Hagar]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 2:00 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Using a gpt label should do it.
>
> Oh I forgot to mention that I did use parted and it only sees 2T
>
> mklabel gpt
> mkpart
>
> and then follow the interactive prompts from mkpart
>
>

I believe (you probably want to double check this) but the LSI 3801E
chipset doesn't support drives larger than 2.2TB.  It has the 2.2TB *
in this list (sorry for the pdf link)

http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/60F8711AEDCE705C882578330036302D/$file/US7K3000_CompatGuide_finalv2.1.pdf

You might double check that there isn't a firmware update that doesn't
fix it, but I know there is a fairly large group of LSI chips that
don't support 3 TB drives and never will.

I recently ran into this with a client that had a Dell server with a
LSI card that couldn't handle the 3TB drives.  I ended up buying a
IBM ServeRAID M1015
card (LSI chipset) off of ebay for about $90, flashing it with the
latest IT drivers (here is some info)

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=77b37765286134e71488f7f4288609b4&topic=12767.0

and using Linux software RAID (mdadm).  The nice thing about flashing
the IT firmware (instead of the usually default installed IR firmware)
is that it completely pulls out the middle man and the card just
becomes a controller and doesn't put any RAID "mojo" on the drives,
(some cards when you do JBOD or "single disk" actually make them
single RAID 0 instances, so you can't easily put them in another
machine with a different controller card).


Hope this helps,

Preston