3 TB USB disk

[Thomas Mueller]

from Thomas Krause:

> I connected a 3TB USB disk to a FreeBSD 9.3 server. The drive is
> recognized as 2 disks (da0: 2 TB and da1: 1TB). What is
> wrong here?
 
> Okay, my mistake. The enclosure supports only 2 TB HDDs. Its a fantec DB-ALU2

Your first post sounded like it was a USB hard drive as opposed to an enclosure.

I had a 3 TB USB 3.0 hard drive, sectors were 4096 bytes, OK with FreeBSD and Linux (System Rescue CD).

I also have a 3 TB hard drive in a Sabrent enclosure, USB 2.0 and eSATA.  Partitioning scheme is GPT.

With USB 2.0, NetBSD can see the partitions, but not FreeBSD or Linux (System Rescue CD), though FreeBSD and Linux see the disk.

With eSATA, it looks just like an internal SATA hard drive to system (UEFI), and to NetBSD, FreeBSD and Linux, which can see the partitions.

If your USB disk is really a SATA hard drive in an enclosure, you could try using eSATA if your enclosure has that feature.

There are hard-drive enclosures on the market that support both USB 3.0 and eSATA.

There are also eSATA cables and internal eSATA adapters and connectors.

Tom