SuperMicro X7SPA-HF-D525-O 3TB HDD support?

[Antioch18]

Does anyone know whether or not the SuperMicro X7SPA-HF-D525-O board supports 3TB HDDs?

Can't seem to find any information on this.

Thanks,
Antioch

 

[ProtoSD]

I'd be curious to know this as well. Barring any further floods or financial problems of my own, I'd like to start replacing my disks with larger ones this fall.

 

[Antioch18]

Well what kind of BIOS does your board have? (U)EFI?

 

[ProtoSD]

I have the same board, actually the HO. I haven't checked lately what the latest BIOS release is.

 

[survive]

Hi guys,

That board uses the Intel ICH7 chipset, right? I've found a number of forum posts saying that 3TB drives work with the ICH7, I found this from Hitachi:

http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/EA3C2532A751C279882577DF0059E290/$file/Deskstar_7K3000_CompatGuide_final.pdf

and these 2 FAQ posts from Supermicro:

http://www.supermicro.com/support/faqs/faq.cfm?faq=12436
http://www.supermicro.com/support/faqs/faq.cfm?faq=12349

I think it gets down to the ICH7 can do 3TB drives just fine (but might not boot from them) as long as the driver you use is "3TB-aware".

-Will

 

[ProtoSD]

Thanks for digging that up and posting it Will, good to know.

 

[Antioch18]

Thanks for the info. However this board series uses the Intel ICH9R chipset so maybe you had a typo :)

According to the last link:

Can we use 3TB HDD with X7SPA in Free BSD?

Answer
Free BSD can't support 3TB HDD well. We don't suggest using 3TB HDD with X7SPA in Free BSD.

http://www.supermicro.com/support/fa....cfm?faq=12349

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, right? So I guess my next question is does FreeNAS/BSD support 3TB HDs well *now*? (The post quoted above is from 8/3/2011, almost a year ago).

Thanks,
Antioch

 

[ProtoSD]

I had to double check, but you are correct Antioch.

Can you post the link to where you saw that FreeBSD can't support 3TB disks well? I'm curious what version they are discussing.

 

[Stephens]

http://www.supermicro.com/support/faqs/faq.cfm?faq=12349

 

[ProtoSD]

Thanks, I just posted feedback asking for more details. Who knows what version of FreeBSD they tested it with or what specifically didn't work well. Remember, these are the guys that said this board only supported 4GB of RAM which didn't turn out to be accurate.

 

[Antioch18]

That is true!

I have a 3TB HD sitting in my main computer. I'm toying around with the idea of ordering the server parts minus the HDs and seeing if this 3TB HD works in FreeNAS as a non-boot drive. However, I have no idea how to test and see if it has "good support."

 

[Stephens]

The best test is to do what you want to do. Install the drive, create a pool, copy data to it (preferably with some type of checksum). Copy the data back (different location). Create a new checksum. Compare checksums. Of course that doesn't tell you if there's some strange bug like only being able to access 2.3GB of the 3TB drive, but the ZPOOL status should tell you if it's really seeing all your space.

 

[Daisuke]

http://forums.freenas.org/showthrea...running-on-8-0-2&p=34287&viewfull=1#post34287