Are thumpers still interesting in 2011 ? (raidz3 on x4500 @ 3.0gbps ...)

[Gerrit Kühn]

On Wed, 6 Jul 2011 18:01:20 -0700 (PDT) George Sanders
<gosand1982 at yahoo.com> wrote about RE: Are thumpers still interesting in
2011 ? (raidz3 on x4500 @ 3.0gbps ...):

GS> Is this indeed the case ?  The six controllers that are built into a
GS> "thumper" (a x4500) cannot see space beyond 2TB on a single disk ?

I don't know what is built into Thumpers. If it is based on LSI1068
chipsets, 2TB is the limit. At least that is what I was told by several
support people and also found out myself by doing some Google and by
trying out several firmware versions available. It is a hardware limitation
of the chipset that cannot be circumvented by a firmware update.
However, one of the supportes I talked to claimed that the limitation only
existed for SATA drives and SAS would be working beyond 2TB. I cannot say
if this is really true, because I did not get any technical explanation
why this should be different with SAS drives, and I do not have any SAS
drives here to test.

GS> This is very good information - thank you - as I was considering using
GS> an old x4500 with 3TB disk drives...

So just be careful and try it with one drive first before buying some
dozen of them... :-)

GS> Is there really no firmware update - from either LSI or Sun - that
GS> fixes this ?

I was told it is a hardware limitation and thus cannot be fixed.


cu
  Gerrit