3Ware 9550sx 8LP seeing existing disks as wrong size

[Xcapee 0]

Hi all,

I have replaced a motherboard, and moved a set of 4 x 3TB drives onto a 3Ware 9550sx 8LP as the replacement motherboard has only 2 sata ports.

The server is running freeNAS on free BSD. The ZFS set was created via the freenas GUI which partitions a 2GB swap then remainder partition is used to create the ZFS vdev. It should therefore be ~3TB but is showing only as 801.6GB.

The 9550 has all ports in JBOD mode. At first I wondered if there was something weird going on with interpreting the 4k sector size incorrectly, but the size is out by a fact of ~3.75 not a factor of 8 so I think that's unlikely.

There are other disks on the controller (2TB & less) that show up correctly.

Can anyone explain what is going on? Better yet what I can do about it?

Edited May 2, 2014 by Xcapee

[Kdawgca 11]

Hi,

It looks like an issue with the controller.

What are the disk drive and array size limitations with the LSI 3ware RAID controllers?

Answer:

The LSI 3ware 7000 and 8000 series controllers can technically support disk drives of up to 2TB maximum in capacity, but we do not recommend using any drive >1 TB with these controller models. Please see the following link for further information regarding 7000/8000 series cards and >1TB drives:

http://mycusthelp.info/LSI/_cs/AnswerDetail.aspx?s&inc=7879

The LSI 3ware 9500S, 9550SX(U), and 9590SE series controllers can support disk drives of up to 2 TBytes maximum incapacity. That is to say, the limit of the size of an individual disk drive within an array is 2TB maximum.

See http://mycusthelp.info/LSI/_cs/AnswerDetail.aspx?s&inc=8009

The 9650SE, 9690SA, and 9750 series controllers support >2TB physical drives, currently up to 3TB physical devices (note: latest firmware must be used).

http://mycusthelp.info/LSI/_cs/AnswerDetail.aspx?s&inc=4956

You might be able to get the card to see the drives as 2.2TB+800GB(see 3TB article). Partitioning before hand manually(might need a separate utility) or seeing if there is a split volume option might work...

[Xcapee 0]

Thanks Kdawgca,

You're right. I'll need to get a newer card if I want to use those 3TB drives.

Much appreciated

[mejv 0]

Gentlemen,

Sorry to tell you that 3ware products before the 9650SE cannot support over 32bits LBA values (over 2 TiB or 2.2TB).

Also, none of the 3ware products would support 4kB sectors.

The 9550SX being old, there is no chance they will update its firmware since the product is EOL...

As far as I know, An Array could go over 2TiB but the OS needs to be able to support volumes > 2TiB to be able to access it.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

MEJV