Thank you for your response, Bryan. It appears that the 3Ware card is reporting the disk array size correctly. I've now created 2 arrays on the controller - one is 1999.9 GB (/dev/sda) and the other is 2499.9 GB (/dev/sdb) as reported by 'fdisk -l': [root at anchor ~]# fdisk -l /dev/sda Disk /dev/sda: 1999.9 GB, 1999957393408 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243147 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 1 243147 1953078246 83 Linux As you can see, /dev/sda1 uses all 243147 cylinders. Unfortunately, when creating /dev/sdb1, only the first 36585 of 303934 cylinders can be used: [root at anchor ~]# fdisk /dev/sdb <snip> Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sdb: 2499.9 GB, 2499946741760 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 303934 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System Command (m for help): n Command action e extended p primary partition (1-4) p Partition number (1-4): 1 First cylinder (1-36585, default 1): Using default value 1 Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-36585, default 36585): Using default value 36585 It appears to me that the 3Ware card is reporting the information correctly, but fdisk is having the trouble. Is this due to running 32-bit software? Do you think running on 64-bit hardware and 64-bit CentOS will fix this problem? Many thanks. -Sean On Mon, 2005-08-22 at 17:46, centos-bounces at centos.org wrote: > On Mon, 2005-08-22 at 17:35 -0500, Sean Staats wrote: > > We recently bought a 32-bit Xeon system with a 12-port 3Ware RAID card > > and a dozen 500GB drives. We wanted to create 4TB drive arrays; > > however, we soon discovered that there is about a 2.2TB drive array size > > limit on 32-bit hardware. Does that sound correct? > > Yes, 2^40 = 2TiB ~ 2.2TB (2.2 * 10^12). This is a PC geometry issue, > although Linux can get around it. > > > Would replacing the 32-bit mobo/cpu with a 64-bit mobo/cpu allow us to > > use drive arrays larger than 2.2TB? > > Actually it's a 3Ware question because 3Ware has an intelligent ASIC on- > board. It's driving the disk array, not Linux. It's merely presenting > the disk array as a block, and Linux talks to the ASIC, not the disks. -- +---------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Sean Staats Systems Administrator, Developer | Questia Media, Inc. http://www.questia.com | PGP public key: http://www.staats.us/sean/keys/qpgp.asc |"Linux - World domination. Fast." --Linus Torvalds +---------------------------------------------------------------------+