On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 10:52 PM, Philip Warner
Hi All,
I have a 4TB external drive with USB/FW/eSATA interfaces available (it's basically a self-contained RAID5 with 5x1TB disks). It can be configured to show as a drive of pretty much any size up to 4TB.
I would like to use this disk with SuSE and am interested to know what I need to do. I assume I need:
- Recent SuSE (eg. 11.0) - 64 bit arch
I assume you know you are pushing the envelope. 31-bits of addressing gives you 1TB with 512 byte sectors. 32-bits of addressing gives you 2TB. So a bug anywhere in the hardware/software stack that fails to use the full 48-bits allowed by spec. will cause you problems. More typically people have a small internal boot drive (or RAID-1 boot pair) and create a series of 1TB external volumes. Then use LVM to build up the multi-TB volumes as desired from the 1TB building blocks. I'm pretty sure that methodology has been tested well above the 4TB level you are attempting. If you really NEED to have a single 4TB external volume you have to accept that you are likely one of the first to try it, so bugs are to be expected. Assuming eSata, I would expect you will have issues with: The external enclosure itself. Most are limited to exporting 1TB or 2TB volumes. The eSata card. I've had to upgrade all of my cards firmware just to get them to see 1TB drives. I doubt any are spec'ed to support 4TB drives yet. The Sata kernel driver specific to your controller. The generic kernel sata driver infrastructure. --- Fortunately most eSata controllers report the disk drive sizes at the bios level. Is that showing up correctly for you? (I'll be very surprised if it is.) Greg -- Greg Freemyer Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer First 99 Days Litigation White Paper - http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/99%20Days%20whitepaper.pdf The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org