The Real Maximum Hard Disk Size on Intel Atom D510 System

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I'm interested in an Intel Atom D510 based RAID system. The manufacturer lists the maximum drive limit as 2TB, yet everything I've read says that SATA supports much more than that.

Is the 2TB "limit" based on current 3.5" drive densities, or is there something preventing an Atom system from handling drives larger than 2TB?

Best Answer

The 2.2TB limit is actually a limitation of the MBR Partition Table. To address larger drives you have to use a GPT (GUID Partition Table). However not all OS's support booting off a GPT Partition Table.

However I have no idea if there are any imposed limitations with the ATOM cpu beyond these considerations.

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Any experience with SATA SAS Interposer Cards

My two cents: If you are concerned about the edge case failures that may occur with SATA hardware (specifically, lousy SATA controllers), spend the money on real SAS disks.

These cards do what they say on the tin: They translate SAS (SCSI) commands to SATA commands, and even implement a few themselves (like power- and spinup-control).
They do nothing else (the drives are still SATA, their performance characteristics are unchanged, their reliability is unchanged, etc.), and they add a new layer of complexity into your environment (They are hardware + software, either of which could fail, have a defect, etc.) -- From my point of view you are increasing your net chance of a failure versus just buying an appropriate SAS drive.

Why does unpartitioned Hitachi HDS5C3020 drive start consuming 50% more power 15 minutes after boot

Sounds very much like the drives are doing SMART scrubbing (automatic offline testing).

smartctl -a /dev/hdx

should confirm the configuration with:

Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.

Disable with:

smartctl --offlineauto=off /dev/hdx

It could be something else too...

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Any experience with SATA SAS Interposer Cards

Why does unpartitioned Hitachi HDS5C3020 drive start consuming 50% more power 15 minutes after boot

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