3TB USB HD is showing up as 801GB

Diovanti · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2003 Posts: 63

I just got a 3GB Hitachi HD and put it into a USB external hard drive enclosure. The problem is linux cannot see its full capicity. The drive in the enclosure has been tested with a windows 7 machine connecting with esata and it works fine under windows.

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

cat /usr/src/linux/.config | grep LBDAF ?

Jon Wilder · Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2011 12:36 am Post subject:

Diovanti · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2003 Posts: 63

madchaz · Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2011 1:11 pm Post subject:

screengrabs of menuconfig are pretty useless. Try the cat/grep command krinn posted to see if you have the option. It is required to access disks that are that large.
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2011 2:47 pm Post subject:

You won't find the large block option on 64 bit systems

Diovanti · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2003 Posts: 63

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2011 3:47 pm Post subject:

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

If it works without the USB in the way, then the USB adaptor is junk.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2011 9:26 pm Post subject:

Diovanti,

chithanh · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 8:16 am Post subject:

Almost all drives will present 512 byte logical sectors to the OS. Very few exceptions exist (e.g. Samsung S1 Mini) which use 4k logical sectors.

You could try to upgrade your kernel.

Diovanti · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2003 Posts: 63

chithanh · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 8:56 am Post subject:

It appears to me that this is a kernel problem. If the enclosure is a recent model, you can try to toggle USB Attached SCSI support in your kernel, maybe that will make a difference.

Diovanti · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2003 Posts: 63

Also one thing I should be a little more clear on: Windows 7 will show the drive's true capacity using usb only when it has already been partitioned previously using a esata/sata connection. If the drive is blank, it will show up to windows as ~800 GB

Maybe the drive's firmware is reporting 800GB? Perhaps for some compatibility reasons for older BIOSes? There's no jumpers on this thing, though. The drives model is: Hitachi HDS5C3030ALA630. I didn't see anyting about this on the manufacturers website. I found another post where someone was having a smilar model Hatachi drive showing up as 801GB as well: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1573971

chithanh · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 9:48 am Post subject:

Ok in that case I take that back and it could be a problem of the USB enclosure. Did you try to contact the manufacturer? If it doesn't work properly on Windows, then they can hardly refuse support.

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 10:52 am Post subject:

A lot of USB external enclosures, mention that they are good up to 2TB.
It probably requires a firmware upgrade (if offered) for the enclosure.
Something to keep in mind if one wants to use 2TB+ disks in them.

Note: when disks get over 2TB then many systems have problems with the MBR.
GPT (GUID Partition Table) will be the next big thing for VLD (Very Large Disks)
but very few motherboard and enclosure manufacturers support that yet.

Edit to add: from this link http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1657961.html

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 11:10 am Post subject:

The enclosure should not care about data on the drive, including filesystem metadata.
The OS handles the filesystem, the drive gets commands at the block level.

800G is a strange size to get reported too. Its not the 137G limit of early LBA so the enclosure is clearly seeing 48 bit LBA, or it couldn't report the drive size as 800G. The drives response to the identify command is a 512b data block ... just like any block read off the disk.
The enclosure shouldn't care about that either.

As I said earlier, a 3T drive will use 4k physical sectors, 512b blocks will be faked. That should not be an issue for the enclosure.
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Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 11:54 am Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 2:02 pm Post subject:

Anon-E-moose,

Disk Geometry has been a fiction since drives reached 4G. Everything is Logical Block Addressing (LBA) now.
Geometry is only used by old tools and operating systems and as you say, the most you can address with CHS is about 8G
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Computer users fall into two groups:-
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those that have never had a hard drive fail.

frostschutz · Advocate Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: Germany

Can you actually put >2TB of data on the drive in windows through USB?

The enclosure has to support it (the usb<->sata translation unfortunately isn't "dumb" enough to ignore the size), otherwise it shouldn't work at all.

If there's any way to give your Linux box eSATA capability, do that and forget about USB... it's much faster than USB2 too...

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 2:28 pm Post subject:

LBA still has it's problems and limits.
So no we haven't gotten away from geometry, we've just expanded it out some :lol:

There are many articles mentioning these problems, here's part of one

DONAHUE · Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 6:55 pm Post subject:

for example $6 solution
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Diovanti · n00b Joined: 27 Feb 2003 Posts: 63

Thanks for all the replies. The enclosure just isn't compatible with a 3TB drive. I've ordered one specifically that offers 3TB support.

While I could add e-sata to my gentoo box, this drive is going to be soon hooked up to a plug computer (Guruplug) and all it has are two USB ports.

mbjr · Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2013 7:13 pm Post subject:

*bump*

Did the new enclosure solve it?
I have 3 different enclosures from different manufacturers, an older one back from a year ago and and one I have just purchased to solve this particular problem :>
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