LSI 9211-8i HBA Larger than 8 TB Drives

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mason736

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Mar 17, 2013
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I purchase a Supermicro 4U 36 Bay X9DRI-LN4F 2x Xeon E5-2690V2 10 Core box from Unixsurplus (Mr. Rackables) on ebay. The unit has a LSI 9211-8i HBA in it currently. The listing stated it would work with up to 8 TB drives just fine, and it is doing just that. I've loaded it with a number of 8TB drives thus far, and no issues.

With some of the larger drives 10 and 12 TB drives coming down in price, is there anything from preventing the LSI 9211-8i from recognizing drives larger than 8TB? I'd like to put in a 12TB drive as my parity drive (UnRaid), and move the 8TB drive i'm currently using into the pool.
 

msg7086

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May 2, 2017
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Unless there are other specific reason. Otherwise LBA48 supports up to 128PiB and I think we are good for a while.
 

BLinux

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Jul 7, 2016
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The issue with drive size limit has to do *mostly* with LBA width size. With SATA, LBA48 as mentioned is in use, with SAS it is LBA64, and SAS controllers map ATA commands to SCSI commands. More info on this subject here:


short answer is that if your hardware can handle the >2TB limit, you probably don't have to worry about drive size limitations (at least from the hardware) for quite some time... at least not until we reach 8-ZiB size HDDs/SSDs.
 

msg7086

Active Member
May 2, 2017
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The issue with drive size limit has to do *mostly* with LBA width size. With SATA, LBA48 as mentioned is in use, with SAS it is LBA64, and SAS controllers map ATA commands to SCSI commands. More info on this subject here:
short answer is that if your hardware can handle the >2TB limit, you probably don't have to worry about drive size limitations (at least from the hardware) for quite some time... at least not until we reach 8-ZiB size HDDs/SSDs.
Thanks for the great video! That's super informative.

Although IMHO a bit shorter, like 12 or even 10 minutes would be better to watch.
 

BLinux

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Jul 7, 2016
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Thanks for the great video! That's super informative.

Although IMHO a bit shorter, like 12 or even 10 minutes would be better to watch.
Thanks for the feedback; really appreciate it. I agree, and actually did try to make it shorter, but found it hard to cut out material without assuming the viewer had prior knowledge. Was there any specific part you thought could be cut out? Thanks again for your thoughts.
 

msg7086

Active Member
May 2, 2017
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Thanks for the feedback; really appreciate it. I agree, and actually did try to make it shorter, but found it hard to cut out material without assuming the viewer had prior knowledge. Was there any specific part you thought could be cut out? Thanks again for your thoughts.
That's true. It is hard to make it shorter. I'd say I started skipping from around 10:00 so I'd assume the content from 10:00 can somehow be shortened. Although that's based on my knowledge assumption so I don't know if that's gonna affect people's understanding. Just my 2c.