WD Red 4tb not detected correctly

[Fury9R]

All,

A big thank you for all the suggestions. Pleased to say that both camcontrol and smartctl are both reporting correct values for the disk now!

camcontrol identify ada0

LBA48 supported 7814037168 sectors
...
Host Protected Area (HPA) yes no 7814037168/7814037168

smartctl -a /dev/ada0

User Capacity: 4,000,787,030,016 bytes [4.00 TB]

Cheers
Sean

 

[Fury9R]

In Conclusion:

I'm not 100% sure what fixed it. After the first reboot following setting with camcontrol it was still showing as 3TB. But this was more likely down user error.

I tweeked some of the BIOS settings (although I doubt this actually affected the HPA) then reran camcontrol hpa ada0 -P -s 7814037168 as instructed, rebooted and hey presto.

[aside] I removed the 1TB disk which had been on ada0 as that's got data on that I didn't want to loose, hence the "problem" disk moved from ada1 to ada0 [/aside]

Code:

Detected Disks
Device   Device Model   Description   Size   Serial Number   Rotation Rate   Transfer Rate   S.M.A.R.T.   Controller   Controller Model   Temperature   Status
ada0   WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0   Western Digital Red   4.00TB   WD-WCC7K4YP3H5L   5400 rpm   3.0 Gb/s   Available, Enabled   ahcich2   Intel ICH10 AHCI SATA controller   28 °C   ONLINE
ada1   WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0   Western Digital Red   4.00TB   WD-WCC7K7LXA2P3   5400 rpm   3.0 Gb/s   Available, Enabled   ahcich3   Intel ICH10 AHCI SATA controller   28 °C   ONLINE
ada2   WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0   Western Digital Red   4.00TB   WD-WCC7K1JKYN67   5400 rpm   3.0 Gb/s   Available, Enabled   ahcich4   Intel ICH10 AHCI SATA controller   28 °C   ONLINE
ada3   WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0   Western Digital Red   4.00TB   WD-WCC7K6RKNNA6   5400 rpm   3.0 Gb/s   Available, Enabled   ahcich5   Intel ICH10 AHCI SATA controller   28 °C   ONLINE
ada4   WDC WD40EFRX-68N32N0   Western Digital Red   4.00TB   WD-WCC7K5ET116A   5400 rpm   3.0 Gb/s   Available, Enabled   ahcich6   Intel ICH10 AHCI SATA controller   28 °C   ONLINE

 

[danb35]

I clearly owe you a retraction, and thanks for bringing the issue up so that now the answer is here. Though it leads to the question of why or how does this happen with a brand new drive.

 

[styno]

I am sure it's not brand new, I've seen this on used enterprise drives were they use larger drives with an HPA to replace smaller capacity drives.
I found the HPA quite a pain to remove as for some reason it sometimes doesn't *stick* after a reboot. So before adding the HPA-removed drives to a pool, make sure you poweroff the system completely and restart as pools are not happy with size changes over a reboot ;)

 

[danb35]

@Fury9R is saying the disk is brand new. When I ran into about the same issue three years ago, the disks were brand new--or at least they were ordered as brand new and appeared to be such when I got them.

 

[Fury9R]

I clearly owe you a retraction, and thanks for bringing the issue up so that now the answer is here. Though it leads to the question of why or how does this happen with a brand new drive.

The NAS box I am building has gone through several iterations. I started the "project" about 7 years ago to re-purpose a then 8 year old Dell desktop I had lying around and sort of grew from there. Since then it has gone through 2 PC cases, about 5 CPUs, half a dozen different mobos, several hard drives and countless system updates and has still yet to be used in anger. About the only thing that has remained constant is the thumb drive I am using to boot off.

My best guess is that the culprit was one of the motherboards bios configs, in combination with a 3 TB drive where an insignificant fraction of the drive was allocated as an HPA leaving 3TB-n usable space which was still 3TB. When the bigger 4TB drive was plugged in the OS continued to think that everything above the 3TB-n mark on ada1 (or however it identified it) was allocated as HPA.

Lesson to be learned from this. When making such drastic changes it's probably better to do so with a clean installation of the OS rather than just upgrade to the latest version.

Thanks again to all who took the time to respond. I've still got a lot to learn, although from reading the most excellent Slideshow explaining VDev, zpool, ZIL and L2ARC for noobs!, I think I am going to have to revise my plan to use ZFS. But that's a topic for another day/thread/forum.

Cheers
Sean