Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Bill Kenworthy <billk@×××××××××.au>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Getting around ancient SATA disk size limitations
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2012 06:36:46
Message-Id: 1340001303.893.10.camel@troll
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] Getting around ancient SATA disk size limitations by felix@crowfix.com
1 On Sun, 2012-06-17 at 23:16 -0700, felix@×××××××.com wrote:
2 > I have an ancient system which was quite the bee's knees in its day 8 years ago, but is showing its age.
3 >
4 > I plugged two 4TB SATA drives in and the BIOS hangs trying to display the disk size. Whether it is the size itself, or from using 4K blocks, I do not know.
5 >
6 > I bought a USB 3.0 disk enclosure and the system refused to even acknowledge its presence. USB 3.0 may be advertised as backwards compatible, but not on my system.
7 >
8 > I put one of the drives into an old USB 2.0 enclosure, and while it was found and useable, it saw the size as 1.6TB.
9 >
10 > I can't get a USB 3.0 PCI card; there are PCI-e cards, but my system is PCI and PCI-X.
11 >
12 > I did get a SATA II PCI card (SATA III requires PCI-e), but won't get a chance to plug it in for a few days. I'm hoping it will let me use the 4T drives.
13 >
14 > Does anyone know of any verified cheap tricks to make this old system recognize the 4TB drives properly? I'm not interested in any NAS or other expensive solutions; I'd just as soon buy a cheap modern system and lots of USB 3.0 disk enclosures. But I'd rather not go that route yet.
15 >
16
17 32bit or 64 bit system?
18
19 Kernel options for large file systems?
20
21 BillK

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