Question pci drive limitation

[medic5678]

I"m going to run openmedia vault in an older pc (i5-6th gen). The drive capacity is 4tb. I'm wondering if I can get away with larger drives if I'm not booting on them. I want to run omv with raid 1 since I've got two 12TB drives. Wondering if the 4tb limitation is based on the need to boot with a drive and it won't apply to drives you're just using for storage? This is the PC I'm looking at as a storage server. Thanks to all who reply.

 

[USAFRet]

I"m going to run openmedia vault in an older pc (i5-6th gen). The drive capacity is 4tb. I'm wondering if I can get away with larger drives if I'm not booting on them. I want to run omv with raid 1 since I've got two 12TB drives. Wondering if the 4tb limitation is based on the need to boot with a drive and it won't apply to drives you're just using for storage? This is the PC I'm looking at as a storage server. Thanks to all who reply.

This depends on all the parts involved.

Drives, motherboard, etc, etc.
What will this system be used for?
Why RAID 1? What is your actual backup routine?

 

[medic5678]

This depends on all the parts involved.

Drives, motherboard, etc, etc.
What will this system be used for?
Why RAID 1? What is your actual backup routine?

Looking for reliability. Not concerned with speed. Question is just whether the bios will limit these drives (waterpanther 12 tb DAS drives) or not when using linux.

 

[USAFRet]

Looking for reliability. Not concerned with speed. Question is just whether the bios will limit these drives (waterpanther 12 tb DAS drives) or not when using linux.

The applicable drive size depends on the capabilities of the motherboard.

 

[evermorex76]

What makes you think there is a 4TB limit in the first place? BIOS-based systems have a 2TB limit for partitions because they use the MBR partitioning scheme. If you are using UEFI, then the boot drive can be larger using GPT partitioning (which is presumably the case if the PC currently has a 4TB boot drive). A BIOS-based system can also have an MBR drive less than 2TB as the boot drive, and then you can use GPT for a storage drive that is 12TB. You seem to have UEFI anyway you should have no problems at all and can just connect the drives, set up the RAID, and configure the drive as GPT, or you can eliminate the 4TB drive and make the RAID array the boot drive using GPT. (Installation of OMV will presumably format it properly.)

I don't know what any of that has to do with PCI, though.

WaterPanther incidentally doesn't appear to be particularly good. They're just refurbing other brands from what I can see, or reselling rejects from them.