3T drives showing up as 2.2T

[J]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 3:24 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 3:17 PM, Preston Hagar <prestonh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I believe (you probably want to double check this) but the LSI 3801E
>> chipset doesn't support drives larger than 2.2TB.  It has the 2.2TB *
>> in this list (sorry for the pdf link)
>
> damn.  this looks like my smoking gun - thanks a lot!
>
> now my bind is this - Sun's official list of 'supported' cards for the
> J4400 is pretty small, and all very very old.  I don't care about
> Sun/Oracle support because these pieces of gear are well out of
> support.
>
> What do you suppose are the chances of a newer card that supports 3T
> drives working with the J4400.   In theory shouldn't anything work?  I
> realise they have an official list of supported cards for their own
> support reasons.

Good chance?

I say that USUALLY what a hardware vendor says is "offically
supported" and what "actually works" are two different things.  Since
the RAID card handles all the work, the OS controls the drivers, the
motherboard really shouldn't care WHAT is plugged into the PCI slots,
it should only be concerned with passing data along the PCI bus as
directed by the OS driver.

However, I say USUALLY above because there are cases where that may
not work. Lenovo laptops, for example, have a nasty habit of having
IDs of "acceptable" wifi modules burned into their firmware... so if
you try to swap out Lenovo's broadcom chip for a similar Atheros chip
(even if it's a Lenovo atheros module), the laptop could reject the
new module because its not on the "approved" list.

That said, I've only ever seen that happen on laptops.  7 years in IBM
System X and I never ran into a case where a server would only support
a specific raid card, with the exception of the things like ServeRAID
7k which were merely plugin modules that added RAID support to the
onboard SAS/SATA controller, rather than offload all that to a PCI
card with its own processor.