BIOS 2TB limit

[Evil Morty]

Hello everyone,

 

So a couple of days ago I've bought 2 4TB's drive to use in a hypervisor.

What I didn't know was that the BIOS can only see 2TB, my motherboard (P7P55D LE) does not have support for UEFI, so that's a problem.

 

Can anybody confirm that if I buy a SATA-controller, that supports 64bit LBA and RAID, I can run both of these drives in RAID-1, without the BIOS limiting it? 

 

Giovanni

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

A quick google search on your motherboard found this tool from asus http://event.asus.com/mb/2010/disk_unlocker/

[agent_x007]

Booting from GPT is UEFI thing.
GPT is Windows thing.

Format drive in GPT (64-bit OS required), and you should get full capacity in Widnows (not in BIOS).

[Evil Morty]

1 minute ago, SCHISCHKA said:

A quick google search on your motherboard found this tool from asus http://event.asus.com/mb/2010/disk_unlocker/

Yes I've seen that one, that's not the problem though. Windows can see the 4TB drives, but I need ESXi to recognize RAID.

That's why I'm asking if a SATA-controller would bypass the limit.

 

Just now, agent_x007 said:

GPT is Windows thing.
Booting from GPT is UEFI thing.
Format drive in GPT (64-bit OS required) and you should get full capacity.

Yes I know, Windows does recognize it (see above).

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

7 minutes ago, Giovanni Kosman said:

Yes I've seen that one, that's not the problem though. Windows can see the 4TB drives, but I need ESXi to recognize RAID.

That's why I'm asking if a SATA-controller would bypass the limit.

 

Yes I know, Windows does recognize it (see above).

Oh sorry. I think a PCI card will work coz it has its own Sata control chip. Last time I used a PCI sata card; after bios splash it presented its own delay so I could go into a menu detect drives, and fiddle around with raid

[Evil Morty]

1 minute ago, SCHISCHKA said:

Oh sorry. I think a PCI card will work coz it has its own Sata control chip. Last time I used a PCI sata card; after bios splash it presented its own delay so I could go into a menu detect drives, and fiddle around with raid

And the RAID menu of that card recognized 2TB+?

[fjdhdhcyfhf]

4 minutes ago, Giovanni Kosman said:

And the RAID menu of that card recognized 2TB+?

This was years ago and 2tb would not have been affordable back then. The card you buy will state its max

[manikyath]

10 minutes ago, SCHISCHKA said:

Oh sorry. I think a PCI card will work coz it has its own Sata control chip. Last time I used a PCI sata card; after bios splash it presented its own delay so I could go into a menu detect drives, and fiddle around with raid

8 minutes ago, Giovanni Kosman said:

And the RAID menu of that card recognized 2TB+?

should warn you two of this: if you're gonna do raid, some "raid" cards, arent actually "raid" cards, but a HBA that comes wiht a driver to do software raid in windows.

 

that said, lga1156 is rather dated, seeing 2x 4TB fits in your budget, i'd strongly recommend looking into a system upgrade to something fresher.

[Evil Morty]

1 minute ago, manikyath said:

should warn you two of this: if you're gonna do raid, some "raid" cards, arent actually "raid" cards, but a HBA that comes wiht a driver to do software raid in windows.

 

that said, lga1156 is rather dated, seeing 2x 4TB fits in your budget, i'd strongly recommend looking into a system upgrade to something fresher.

That's true, but I had an old i7 860 around that I didn't use. This HV is gonna be running my NAS & some other stuff for school, so it's fast enough for that.