Lamar Owen wrote: > > On Apr 18, 2012, at 12:16 PM, John R Pierce wrote: >> ah, I can't see anywhere in the BIOS for this SuperMicro X8DT6 mobo >> where to enable EFI, I guess its not supported. <snip> Argh! I missed the beginning of this thread, but this is important for you to know, *specifically* with SuperMicro m/b's: 0 and 1: make sure this 3TB drive is certified for this board. We have a few Caviar Greens that either immediately, or within a few weeks or a month or two suddenly start spitting drive errors - hardware drive errors - but when I take them out and put them in *anything* else, even a cheap external eSATA drive bay, they're fine. After a *lot* of research, I believe it's from how long it waits on error handling, but there's nothing I've found that can change that enablement - WD took that capability away a couple-three years ago. 2: be *SURE* to align it on a 4K boundary, *not* a 512 one. If you change units in parted, it will default want to start in sector 63; change that to 64. Alternatively, if you tell it to start with aligned=opt, it will do it on 2048 (why not 1024, I don't know). This makes a *major* difference in speed... as in quadrupled. 3. See points 0 and 1. Oh, yes, and the two 3TB drives, a Hitachi and a Seagate Constellation, certified for our servers which use the H8QG6 m/b, the *only* two, are not available. They're backordered *everywhere*, including CDW, and Penguin, our vendor for those servers, just admitted to me Monday that I was right, *they* had them on backorder. mark