3TB drives on ZFS and booting

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday, July 26, 2011 4:30:19 am Dimitry Andric wrote:
> On 2011-07-25 15:39, John Baldwin wrote:
> > On Sunday, July 24, 2011 5:52:25 pm Gary Corcoran wrote:
> ...
> >> Bottom line: would I be able to successfully build (and of course boot) a FreeBSD
> >> ZFS-only system using only 3TB drives?
> > You probably want to use GPT instead of MBR, but the GPT ZFS boot code shoul
> > fully handle 64-bit LBAs just fine.
> 
> Isn't that also dependent on the BIOS's ability to handle 64-bit LBA's?

Yes, but the original EDD 1.0 spec that included the 'packet' and extended
INT 13h functions included 64-bit LBAs, so at this point I would expect most
BIOSes to support that.  Also, only BIOSes for controllers that support
logical disks > 2TB (either RAID volumes or large physical disks) have to
actually support having the upper 32-bits be non-zero.  I strongly suspect
that that is in fact true.  That is, if you have a controller new enough to
support a 3 TB drive, it's accompanying BIOS ROM should support 64-bit LBAs.

-- 
John Baldwin