[SOLVED] max hdd capacity for HP Z840

anctop · 12-13-2021, 02:20 AM

Hi,

We have a "HP Z840" workstation running CentOS.

Recently one of the data disks has corrupted and needs replacement.

According to the product spec ("https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/hp-z840-workstation/6978842/document/c04505606"), the largest SATA disk capacity supported is 3TB.
However, we want to upgrade it with a larger one, say 8TB, but not sure whether it will work or not.

Please kindly advise.

syg00 · 12-13-2021, 03:07 AM

That's just what they offered at the time. Unless they have a serious warped firmware (and they have been known to), the "limit" is meaningless.
Stick it in, format as gpt and see what appears.

anctop · 12-13-2021, 06:58 AM

Thanks for the advice.

mrmazda · 12-13-2021, 04:12 PM

"Partition" as GPT. "Formatting" of HDDs, SSDs and NVMEs is done to partitions and logical volumes to create filesystems.

syg00 · 12-13-2021, 04:22 PM

Your pedantry is misplaced - see the manpage for parted for instance. Over-loading of terminology is rife in the industry.

mrmazda · 12-13-2021, 05:03 PM

The format of a partition table is incidental to what a partitioner does, which is manage entries in a "table" that defines size and location of partitions to which filesystem formatting can be applied. Someone with 89 posts might be mislead by imprecise language.

Brains · 12-14-2021, 03:46 AM

Based on my experience with Legacy MBR, which may or may not apply here.
I put an oversized drive in a laptop and all that was recognized by the BIOS was it's limit.
Same for some Dos programs, including Gparted Live at the time.
But the Operating Systems all see and can use the entire disk.

EDIT: Just remembered something else, the last partition had to encompass the excess over BIOS/MB limit otherwise all partitions past that point get lost somehow, perhaps upon reboot.

anctop · 12-15-2021, 12:28 AM

Thank you for all the replies.

The disks in the system are all partitioned with GPT scheme, therefore our main concern is the BIOS behaviour.

While the system is down at the moment, we updated the BIOS and hope it will not cause problems with larger disks.

pan64 · 12-15-2021, 01:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by anctop

Thank you for all the replies.

The disks in the system are all partitioned with GPT scheme, therefore our main concern is the BIOS behaviour.

While the system is down at the moment, we updated the BIOS and hope it will not cause problems with larger disks.

My god, that was extremely long time ago: if there was a limitation in bios you need to put the boot partition at the beginning of the disk. Otherwise (as it was already explained) the OS (linux/kernel) does support it, so you can safely use that disk.