3T drives showing up as 2.2T

[Preston Hagar]

On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 2:24 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.
>
>

I would say very high.  If you don't care about/need official support,
any card with the same kind of connectors and slot should work (with a
chip that supports 3 TB).  Also, I'm not as familiar with Sun support,
but I know with Dell, in the past, when I have switched out their PERC
cards or other RAID cards with my own LSI or whatever, they still
fully support everything except that specific card (although it does
often provide them with a nice scapegoat to blame any problems on).

It looks like the card you have is a PCI-E 8x, with 2 external
SFF-8088 mini-SAS connectors, so I would just get another one with the
same specs, but a newer chip.  I have used the IBM Serveraid M1015
before, which is a PCI-E 8x, but it has 2 internal SFF-8087 mini-SAS
connectors, so it probably isn't right for you.  It uses a  LSI SAS
2008 series chip, which work with 3TB, so I would look for a card with
a SAS 2008 chip in it.

Preston