Summary: 14 yo BIOS can't read 12 TB hard drives During my time-consuming upgrades, frequent changes to many machines filled up the remaining gigabytes on a 5 terabyte dirvish backup disk. New backup drive urgently needed.
Months ago, I purchased a discounted Seagate Ironwolf 12TB SATA disk (aluminum shell has dings, drive works fine). I used an old machine, and a 3GB "live DVD" image on a USB thumbdrive, to format and partition that huge 12 TB disk, with 80 GB on that disk set aside for boot sector, distro image, and swap. (Which seems excessive, but so does every computer, compared to the 8 KB PDP/8 I learned to program 50 years ago; hence I provision for exponential bloat). Modern Linux (like the 20.04 Ubuntu on the thumbdrive) formats (GPT) and reads and writes and tests the entire drive just fine. The 12 TB disk wouldn't boot on the old computer, after three time-consuming attempts. Turns out, the 2008-era Intel DG33FB motherboard is only SATA-2. The Intel BIOS is unable to use the SATA-2 interface and 14yo protocols to boot from to hard drives 10TB or larger. Well, duh. I /was/ able to boot the 12TB on a newer SATA-3 machine, which I temporarily removed from "production". When the backup machine is upgraded, I'll deploy the 12TB drive. It may be time to frisbee the 2008 motherboard, and buy a more recent SATA-3 motherboard. ----- SATA-3 protocols can (in theory) access a 10 Zetabyte (1e22 byte) "disk", though it would need 500,000 years to fill the entire disk at 600MB/s, and another 500,000 years to read it back. 600MB/s is two million times faster than the 300 char/sec PC04 optical tape reader on that ancient PDP-8. If 50 more years brings an additional 2e6 improvement in data rates, hypothetical future interfaces (photons? megamolecules?) may be able to write a 10 ZB drive in a mere 3 months. :-) Keith L. -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected]
