Between lots of other activities this weekend, I fiddled around with my three new 1.5TB drives.\u00a0 It’s been years since I’ve felt like I took some sort of Apocalypse Now trip up the technological congo – but adventures in installing these drives has made me feel close again.\u00a0 What awful adventures getting some wild combination of things working in tech-land have you had?<\/p>\n
How about:<\/p>\n
But anyway, TerabyteLand wasn’t quite as bad as those – but installing these drives helped me relive those days a bit.\u00a0 Long story short – don’t expect to boot from a volume over 2TB.\u00a0 Now, I have hardware RAID on my motherboard with ample SATA ports (six hot-swappable) and hardware support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 0+1. \u00a0 My hope was to put all three drives in a RAID 5 setup for redundancy and read performance.\u00a0 I could successfully create the 3.0TB RAID 5 set, but it was reported as not bootable by an ICH9 and ICH10 RAID controller.\u00a0 After trying 2 other motherboards and digging around on forums, turns out due to current bios limitations.<\/p>\n
MBR BIOS limitation to 2TB<\/em> So, that leaves only two options: run my OS from one of my existing 750GB drives and then have the remaining 3.0TB in a second set as RAID 5, or put two drives in RAID 1 for the OS (mirroring for fault tolerance and read speed) and leave the second drive alone for DVR storage.\u00a0 I went option #2 – but I hate the fact I can’t just have one big bucket of bits.\u00a0 I HATE secondary drives that exist simply because of these stupid limitation.\u00a0 At least I’m not alone<\/a>.<\/p>\n Still, even doing this was painful.\u00a0 Vista had trouble recognizing the drives when I first plugged them in.\u00a0 You had to format them with AHCI first, then switch the bios over to RAID and set up the volume<\/a> – then vista could install to them.\u00a0 Weird.<\/p>\n Any of you set up a large bootable volume like this in Linux?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Between lots of other activities this weekend, I fiddled around with my three new 1.5TB drives.\u00a0 It’s been years since I’ve felt like I took some sort of Apocalypse Now trip up the technological congo – but adventures in installing these drives has made me feel close again.\u00a0 What awful adventures getting some wild combination of things working in tech-land have you had? How about: Getting more than 640k recognized in DOS on an IBM XT via a memory expander…<\/p>\n
\nCurrent BIOS uses MBR (master boot record) for drive support – and MBR only supports drives or partitions up to 2TB.\u00a0 However, the new EFI (extensable firmware interface)<\/a> specification is a BIOS replacement that removes this limitation by allowing the new GPT (GUID Partitioning Table)<\/a> format that supports up to 18 exobyte drives\/partitions.\u00a0 So, in order to boot from a drive larger than 2TB, you need to have a motherboard that runs EFI (currently: Apple, Itanium, and HP-UX boards), and drives formatted with GPT.\u00a0 So at the moment, that means not much love for Windows world.\u00a0 You can create GPT partitions in Vista SP1 – but just not boot from them. <\/a><\/p>\n