mpt(4) cuts 3TiB drives down to 2TiB

[Michael Reifenberger]

On Sun, 8 May 2011, Kenneth D. Merry wrote:

> Date: Sun, 8 May 2011 17:24:05 -0600
> From: Kenneth D. Merry <ken at freebsd.org>
> To: Artem Belevich <art at freebsd.org>
> Cc: Michael Reifenberger <mike at reifenberger.com>,
>     FreeBSD-SCSI <scsi at freebsd.org>
> Subject: Re: mpt(4) cuts 3TiB drives down to 2TiB
> 
> On Sun, May 08, 2011 at 12:31:28 -0700, Artem Belevich wrote:
>> On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 5:13 AM, Michael Reifenberger
>> <mike at reifenberger.com> wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>> the manpage of mptutil states that mpt(4) doesn't support volumes greater
>>> 2TiB,
>>> it suggests to use the disks in JBOD mode.
>>>
>>> Even this seems only to work for disk with less than 2TiB.
>>>
>>> When attaching a Hitachi 7k3000 drive on the LSI SAS/SATA ports of a
>>> Supermicro X8ST3-F board I only see 4294967294 sectors while I get 976773168
>>> sectors when
>>> attaching to the on board SATA ports.
>>>
>>> This leaves the onboard LSI controller useless for bigger disks.
>>>
>>> Is there a way to work around this issue?
>>>
>>> Or is anybody working on enhancing the mpt(4) driver to use the newer API?
>>
>> According to LSI, it's a 'feature'.  Controllers based on
>> LSI1068/1068e (X8ST3-F  uses LSI 1068E)  truncate drive capacity to
>> 2TB:
>> http://kb.lsi.com/KnowledgebaseArticle16399.aspx
>
> I have heard from a friend (i.e. I haven't personally confirmed) that the
> capacity truncation only applies to SATA drives.  If you attach a 3TB SAS
> drive, you should be able to see the full capacity.
>

I can't confirm either since I have no 3TB SAS drives currently.

Thanks for hinting!

Bye/2
---
Michael Reifenberger
Michael at Reifenberger.com
http://www.Reifenberger.com