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Old 06-13-2006, 07:22 PM   #1
BrianK
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Why is my 3.1TB array only showing up as 1.2TB?


I just put together a file server with 8 500GB drives. The 3ware BIOS sees them as 8 465GB drives & after I RAID5 them, it says there's 3.1GB available.

When I fdisk'd it, I used all blocks for one partition.

when I df the new partition (that's using reiserfs), it only shows 1.2TB. Where's the other 2 TB?
 
Old 06-13-2006, 09:22 PM   #2
BrianK
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solved.

FYI: fdisk only supports up to 2TB (and for some reason, that only works out to about 1.29TB of actual space). In order to have partitions larger than 2TB, you have to use parted & create a GPT partition....

> parted
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) mkpart primary 0 3490000
(parted) quit

and you'll have a 3.49TB partition (actually about 3.2TB with reiserfs)
 
Old 06-13-2006, 09:37 PM   #3
cereal83
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We have a san with 4 GB of space and fdisk worked just fine on it. The 2.4 kernel can only see up to 2TB, with 2.6 kernel, you have to select an option under Block devices for "Support for Large Block Devices"


Brian, can I ask what raid controller you used because I tried that same exact thing with a Promise SX8300 and I could not get the kernel to detect it.

Thanks
 
Old 06-13-2006, 10:02 PM   #4
BrianK
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cereal83
We have a san with 4 GB of space and fdisk worked just fine on it. The 2.4 kernel can only see up to 2TB, with 2.6 kernel, you have to select an option under Block devices for "Support for Large Block Devices"


Brian, can I ask what raid controller you used because I tried that same exact thing with a Promise SX8300 and I could not get the kernel to detect it.

Thanks
Interesting. For me, with a brand new Ubuntu install & 2.6 kernel, fdisk would only show enough blocks to fill 1.2TB. cfdisk would see all 3.5TB, but when asked to create a 3.5TB partition, it would act like it worked, but quitting out & returning still showed 1.2TB + lots of free space.

In any event, My hardware setup is this:

3Ware 9550SX-16ML (16 port, multi-lane) - attached to 133MHz 64-bit PCIx
Supermicro X6DHE-XG2 (motherboard)
Dual EM64T Xeons

the 3w-9xxx module was built into my kernel out of the box.

As an FYI: Some of the less expensive RAID cards - especially those from Promise - are just controller cards with no hardware 'acceleration'. They use words like "Hardware Assisted", but, in reality, the driver for the card controls the array, so you are, in effect, using a software RAID that's putting all the load on your CPU.

So there's a whole lot of info you didn't ask or care about.
 
Old 06-13-2006, 10:32 PM   #5
cereal83
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Thanks for the info. I wasn't aware that promise did that. That sucks. I think I might look into one of those cards as the Promise one is a waste of money just sitting in a cabinet.

Well for me fdisk has always worked. I know it worked because I set up the SAN about 2 weeks ago and I did everything to set it up. Well I dunno

Thanks

Last edited by cereal83; 06-13-2006 at 10:33 PM.
 
  


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