Will SATA III 6GB/s HDDs bigger than 3TB work in SATA II 3GB/s 4-bay enclosure?

tnt2000

Prominent
Feb 20, 2017
2
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510
Hi there,

I have a 4-bay HDD enclosure (https://www.akitio.com/blog/discontinued/hydra-super-s-lcm-eol) and I would like to upgrade the 4x 1TB HDDs I have in RAID 5 to a larger capacity (probably 4x 6TB). I've read some threads and found out that SATA III 6GB/s HDDs are backwards compatible with SATA II 3GB/s but I'm wondering if I can use HDDs larger than 3TB in this enclosure (or any other SATA II enclosure) and would appreciate if someone could shed some light. The most important thing for me at this point is reliability and not speed.

Thank you
 
Solution
That unit certainly can use SATA 6.0 Gb/s HDD units.

Use of HDD units over 2 TB each very likely is OK also. The manual for it says it can use HDD's up to 3 TB, and the web page quoting specs for it claims up to 4 TB units are OK. Now, the issue involved is in a detail about the type of "LBA Support" used in the system. There are only two types officially, but Microsoft sort of imposed a third sub-variant in its 32-bit operating systems and the MBR Partition system.

In the context of internal HDD's in a computer, the original LBA system for addressing Sectors (or Allocation Units) on a HDD used 28-bit addressing. 28 bits is sufficient to address up to 128 GiB of data (one GiB is 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes). The newer...
That unit certainly can use SATA 6.0 Gb/s HDD units.

Use of HDD units over 2 TB each very likely is OK also. The manual for it says it can use HDD's up to 3 TB, and the web page quoting specs for it claims up to 4 TB units are OK. Now, the issue involved is in a detail about the type of "LBA Support" used in the system. There are only two types officially, but Microsoft sort of imposed a third sub-variant in its 32-bit operating systems and the MBR Partition system.

In the context of internal HDD's in a computer, the original LBA system for addressing Sectors (or Allocation Units) on a HDD used 28-bit addressing. 28 bits is sufficient to address up to 128 GiB of data (one GiB is 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes). The newer 48-bit LBA system can address vastly more that that, so for any practical purpose that is no longer a limit at all on the size of HDD's you can use. However, 32-bit versions of Windows until recently used a 32-bit LBA sub-variant, and that is what has limited HDD use in some machines to just barely over 2 TB. Closely linked to that is the system for Partitioning a HDD. The older MBR system used a Partition Table with entries for the location (read, address) of the start and end of each Partition stored as 32-bit numbers, so any HDD Partitioned in that way could only use 2 TB of its space. The new GPT system, among its many changes, uses 48-bit addressing in the Partition Table to avoid this issue.

In order to be able to use HDD's over 2 TB, your system needs to have 48-bit LBA Support on three components: the HDD itself (obviously will for a large HDD), the HDD controller, and the Operating System that calls for disk access.

The Akitio Hydra Super-S LCM enclosure clearly says it will use 3 and 4 TB HDD units fully. (In fact, in case someone has a very old OS that cannot deal with large HDD systems it has an option to limit what it does.) Thus it must be using 48-bit LBA.

Last item is the OS and its device drivers. For a Windows system using only internal drives, there is another consideration related to Partitioning. Only HDD's partitioned using the newer GPT system can access over 2 TB. Thus Windows needs to have a device driver that works with such drives. But Microsoft has only included a driver for GPT-Partitioned HDD's with its 64-bit versions of Windows, and not with 32-bit versions. Your situation, however, is different. I am sure your Akitio enclosure came with a driver for it so that Windows can use the enclosure and whatever RAID array you created with it. I would expect that that driver can handle any size of RAID5 array built with any HDD available. I also expect that the driver can work with either 32-bit or 64-bit versions of Windows. Otherwise it could not have worked with four 1 TB units that give you a RAID "drive" over 2 TB total space. HOWEVER, you really should ask Akitio about that to be sure.
 
Solution
Thanks for these answer! I contacted the manufacture and they don't recommend drives larger than 4tb indeed and it would be very time consuming to test so I ended up upgrading the enclosure. Better be safe when it comes to storage.
 

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