NASLite Network Attached Storage

Hello folks.

Playing around with a Gigabyte E350N mini-ITX board again and NL2.

Ran into the 700GB limit problem again while tinkering, and nothing I can do will make NL2 or the HDT see more then 700GB of the drive.

Interestingly, the installation utility sees the drive as a 3TB capacity, but when you go to format it, you can only format 5000-odd inode blocks, and so therefore, only 700GB of the drive is accessable. I temporarily removed the 3TB drive, and put a 2TB WD Green in there and installed NL2 to that. This completes fine, and NL2 can see the whole 2TB, and format it just fine.

Now I added the 3TB back in as another drive and rebooted NL2. NL2 can see the 3TB drive as "Disk-1", but still refuses to format it to more then 700GB.

Now, knowing that NL2 uses ext3 filesystem, I swapped the 2TB boot drive for a CD-ROM drive and booted up a copy of Puppy Linux, and used Gparted to delete anything on the 3TB drive, and then created one single partition of 3TB size, and formatted it to ext3 in Puppy Linux.

That done, I removed the CD-ROM, and replaced the 2TB boot drive and rebooted NL2.

During the boot-up, it finds the 2TB drive and mounts that as "Disk-0"
It also finds the Puppy-formatted 3TB drive and mounts that as "Disk-1"
Both drives' filesystems are reported as clean.

In the NL admin utility, it can see the 2TB formatted from within NL(Disk-0), and it can also see the 3TB formatted outside of NL2, but you can't select it - it just shows as an asterisk.

However, the 3TB drive is accessible on the network, and is reported via the status pages as the correct size and I can copy files to and from it just fine.

So, my question really boils down to:

- Is it OK to use another Linux to format drives that don't want to behave with the NL2 format utility?

Once NL2 boots up and loads it's own low-level drivers for the HDD's, capacity barriers seem to vanish, however, if you are stuck in one of those capacity barriers, NL2 cannot free your HDD from it unless you format the drive outside of NL2.

My assumption is that ext3 is ext3, so no matter what Linux you use to format a drive, if it is ext3, then it should still be accessible to NL2 without fear of any kind of weird issue later on down the track.

Yes?
No?

Looking in the status pages for the server, the 2TB formatted within NL2 has a volume label, but the 3TB formatted in Puppy does not have any volume label - perhaps that is why it is not accessable in the NL2 admin utility......

UPDATE: Yes, NL2 needs a volume label. I rebooted into Puppy, and used Gparted to set a volume label. That done, I reconnected to NL2 and booted it up, and now I can select the drive in the setup utility under NL2, whereas without the volume label, the menu option was just an asterisk.(you could not select the drive).

Despite all the issues with the formatting via NL2, the Puppy-formatted drive is perfectly accessable on the network, and now that it has a drive label, you can see it in the NL storage utility, and it is also correctly shown there as a 3TB drive(2.7GiB).

I suspect that the NL2 formatting utility needs an update at some point, as it does not seem to detect large drives some of the time, yet set them up outside of NL2, and it can then see them just fine.

Technology can be wonderful sometimes, eh?! (rhetorical)

I wouldn't advise modifying the drives to your liking with gparted etc, there is a reason why NL formats it and not you. NL does use the volume label for internal purposes.

It's fine with me if NL2 formats the drive, but the fact of the matter is that NL2's format utility has issues with large drives - it just refuses to format them greater then 700GB or so 9 out of 10 attempts.

Boot up Puppy Linux on exactly the same machine, with HDD in exactly the same position on the SATA controller, and it can see it as 3TB no problems.

NL2 cannot.

NL2 has no problems at all with drives up to 2TB. I have never had a single issue when formatting 2TB or less, but 2.5TB, 3TB and 4TB have ALL failed to format in NL2's own format utility. Gparted can delete any partitions already on the drive, and create one single primary partition and format it to ext3.

Is it conceivable that the E350N motherboard I am using for the NL2 server, is not compatible in some way with NL2? Although, the SATA controller on the E350N is listed in the supported hardware PDF, from what I remember.

Perhaps it is one of those obscure motherboard incompatibility issues?

Can you please confirm for me, that NL2 is in fact natively compatible with HDD's greater then 2TB as a single volume?

Thanks anyway, for taking the time to reply.

EDIT: I will dig out another computer that uses a totally different motherboard, and see if I can setup the 3TB drives on it - perhaps we have some weird motherboard compatibility issue. It's worth a try.

As I have said time and time again, formatting drives with your own software, modifying things like the volume label will yield unexpected and *unsupported* results.

At this point, I'm closing this on our end.

thanks

Don't know how this might fit with your deliberations, but we've never had difficulties formatting 4TB drives on Asus Terminator C3s - certainly a lessor platform than yours. The problem you describe just never came up.

Hiya.

This was a thread from 2014, and the problem has been solved by a change of motherboard. I am not sure why the E-350's would not format more then 2TB, but they just would not do it.
When I rebuilt the server about six months after this thread was posted, I used a different motherboard, and it formatted the full capacity of the drives no problem directly inside of NL2, so I expect there was some kind of subtle incompatibility with the SATA chipset used in the E-350 board.

As I say, with a new board, I don't have this issue. I am using 4TB and 3TB drives on the new board no problem at all.