[mythtv-users] Hitachi 3T drives - reliable?

[Alex Butcher]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2011, Matthew McClement wrote:

> On 20/01/11 09:34, Jean-Yves Avenard wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> On 20 January 2011 04:40, Ronald Frazier <ron at ronfrazier.net> wrote:
>>> Can your system handle 3TB drives? Most system's bioses could not
>>> handle the full capacity (even on the newest computers), which is the
>>> reason that Western Digital was shipping a controller card with their
>>> 3TB hard drives. Also, for Windows I believe you need to be running a
>>> 64-bit version to use the full space, but I don't know whether that's
>>> true for linux too (just in case you're not on 64-bit already). I
>>
>> Sorry, but this doesn't make any sense. Why would a 64 bits OS got
>> anything to do with the size of a hard drive.
>
> Nothing from a technical perspective, however with Windows, there's a
> couple of restrictions. From memory it's something like:
>
> * GPT read/write support requires XP 64, Win2k3 or Vista+. XP 32 and any
> prior Windows version doesn't support GPT
> * GPT boot requires EFI, which is only supported on x86_64 and ia64
> editions of Windows

The situation is much the same with RHEL/CentOS 5:

<https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=467848>

I ended up putting /boot on an MBR-partitioned USB memory stick to get
around this for a couple of x86_64 machines at work with 4x2TB in a RAID10 (4TB
effective) and 4x2TB in RAID5 (so 6TB effective) and both arrays using GPT.

> Matt

HTH,
Alex