Support for hard drives > 2 TB?

[Josh Paetzel]

On Friday, December 03, 2010 06:00:29 am Thomas Mueller wrote:
> Can FreeBSD be successfully installed, and run, on all or part of a hard
> drive > 2 TB?  Sector size would be 4 KB, though I think the hard-drive
> firmware can make sector size look like 512 bytes.  I know fdisk can
> handle up to 2 TB; this limit is not just for BSD but Linux too.
> 
> Western Digital has come out with a SATA hard drive of 3 TB.
> 
> Tom

Sure.  FreeBSD supports installing to and booting from GPT labeled disks that 
don't suffer from the 2TB size limitation that fdisk imposes.  The caveat is 
that very few systems have a BIOS that can boot from a GPT labeled drive.  So 
regardless of your OS, you may still have issues.

It's worth noting that RAID arrays have been larger than 2 TB for years, and 
the way RAID cards have gotten around the issue is to carve off a chunk of the 
array and present it to the OS as a small boot LUN.

-- 
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel
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