NASLite Network Attached Storage

Just to let people know about a potential hardware / driver issue.

I left a couple of messages for support and will update when I get a reply.

Using an Albatron P4 (PX865 Pro) motherboard with two SATA slots serving two WD20ears drived, I installed a Ritmo cc-t55 pci sata (Promise chipset) card to service an additional two drives (Western Digital 2TB) only to find between the card, the drives and Naslite-M2 the drives are not available in any form.

I swapped a couple of older Seagate 1TB drives with success.

Either the card cant address to larger drives or Naslite is not happy with the new western digital drives.

Other forums indicate poor compatibility with the WD20ears, a likely cause of my need to find a compatible card.

Can anyone recommend a pci stat card that will work with WD20ears.

Regards
Thomasd

I swapped out my Adaptec 21610SA and replaced it with a 3Ware 9550SX-12 because the Adaptec card was limited to 1TB drives - the 3Ware is limited to 2TB drives, so when I want to put 3TB (or bigger) drives into my server I will have to change again.

Yep same here but at the mo you wont get to the limit of the card anyway (or not as a single array at least) due to the EXT3 filesystem having a top limit of 16 TiB or 8 x 2 TB drives, I found that out when i hit the limit with 12 x 1.5TB drives used them in R5 with a hot spare.

Doug.

PS the 3ware cards even though are pci-x they do work in a pci slot have just put a 9500-4 into one with 8 x 2TB drives.

I think that the issue may be the new block size being implemented in the new drives called advanced format. The old ones were 512 bytes and the new are I think 4K bytes. This is causing issues for some of the formatting tools and OSs like Linux. I think that there may be a fix for this that Tony and Ralph have put in the distro. They can comment further.

Mike