On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 11:49 PM Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. if you were to add in a second, smaller drive to use only for booting, you could use the 12TB drive for storage on the older system. I am not sure that the SATA version is the reason for this limitation, I believe it has more to do with address lengths supported by the BIOS (which we are now starting to call "firmware" to include both legacy BIOS and modern EFI implemenations). whether it's SATA2 or SATA3 pretty much only affects how fast it can go. and with a spinny drive, you'll never go anywhere near fast enough to notice the difference. but if you have the hardware to spare such that you can just toss out the old machine, go for it. it'll break eventually anyway (and so will the newer one, possibly before the older one does). -wes
