Dave Ireland

I have a SAS-2 controller card coming (pre-flashed to IT mode), which I'll use for booting at better speed, and will give me the option of faster storage for three other SAS drives, but the onboard SAS-1 slots can still be very useful as I'm not doing any RAID at all. Given the paucity of PCI-e slots of useful bandwidth, I might just hold off on the deployment of the SAS-2 card.

I thought it might be obvious from the way I framed the statement, that I was currently filling up the drive. Finally filled it up at 3am and it successfullly holds 3TB, in accordance with Broadcom's statement - it's a SAS running in non-RAID and works fine. I don't know yet how large I can go, but I will eventually find out, as I''m reluctant to waste all those lovely slots.

I'm using an old Supermicro X8DTL-3F with an LSI 1068 SAS controller. I was curious about the hard limit of 2TB, but it turns out it's only in RAID mode. Setting the onboard jumper to enable IT mode and slotting in a Seagate 3TB SAS disc, it's filling up quite happily on test to its full capacity. This is mentioned here... https://www.broadcom.com/support/knowledgebase/1211161495837/using-drives-2tb-in-capacity-with-lsi-sas-hbas There's also an LSI Engineering Note I came across which comfirms this - non-RAID capacity is 'no restriction' in SAS, but still stuck at 2TB in SATA or RAID (for both). Exactly what they mean by 'no restriction' I don't know yet. https://www.supermicro.com/support/faqs/data_lib/S11196_v1.0_Support_for_Drives_Greater_than_2_TB_for_SAS1_IT_IR_Products.pdf