3TB shows as 746.39GB

TeeJayHoward

TeeJayHoward

Limpness Supreme
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Feb 8, 2005
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Seagate ST33000651AS connected to Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B connected to Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 sitting in a regular PCI slot. Drive shows in Windows 7 x64 as 746.39GB.
Same drive, connected to the nForce4 SATA port on the motherboard shows as 2794.39GB.

So, what's the issue? Is it that I have the controller in a regular PCI slot? Does the AOC-SAT2-MV8 not support drives over 2TB? Could it possibly be my 5-in-3 cage? (I can test that, just gotta wait a couple hours for copying to finish.)
 
Did a quick google of that number and found this

The dock makes the drive look like a 4K sector drive with 732566646 sectors. But when you connect it directly to a SATA port, it's a 512-byte sector drive with 5860533168 sectors (or it emulates 512-byte sectors if it's an AF drive, but I'm not sure it's an AF drive). It's this large sector number that's causing trouble, since it requires more than 4 bytes to represent sector addresses (LBAs) this large.

746.39 GiB ~ 801 GB, indeed it does look like you've run into a 4 byte (32-bit) LBA limitation. Windows 7 should be long LBA-capable, so it's either a driver, controller or a BIOS issue.
Click to expand...

http://forums.storagereview.com/index.php/topic/29048-seagate-3-tb-go-flex-smart-values/

Sounds like it is an issue common to 3TB drives from WD as well as Seagate.
 
As it works in the same M/B with the onboard controller, it smells like a controller firmware issue, and you are wrapping around the 2TB support, and seeing the last 746gb of the disk.

Update to latest fw and it should work better ?
 
DJ_Datte said:
Update to latest fw and it should work better ?
Click to expand...
Both controllers have the last firmware produced, 1.0b. They show the drive as being of size 2097151MB. I'm starting to think they might be the issue. Trying a copy of linux to see if it was the Windows drivers provided.

edit: Yup! An old copy of Debian shows the drive as being 3TB in size. It can't access the contents, but it does show the right number of sectors! So, Supermicro's Windows drivers are out of date. Good to know I don't have to buy any new hardware!
 
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