Comments on: SunFire V100 PATA Hard Disks

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 18:39:57 +0000

Thanks for the great info, I am a noob to this, but am learning. Got 4 netra x1’s, a v100, and a v20z for cheap, now learning the path…

By: Scott Alan Miller

Scott Alan Miller — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 01:08:27 +0000

I just formatted one of the V100 units with FreeBSD 9 and gpart and with ZFS it did indeed make a 4GB and a 145GB partition – above teh 137GB limit on my 160GB drives. Excellent.

What is the largest space that anyone has gotten to work? I’ve got some 750GB drives laying around that might be worth experimenting with.

Finding large ATA drives can be problematic these days.

By: Scott Alan Miller

Scott Alan Miller — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:59:43 +0000

That must be handled specifically by FreeBSD as there is no such message with Solaris 10 (which is the latest that I have tested, 11 Express is likely the same and 11 is not supported for the CPU) and it just hard limits to 137GB. I have 160GB drives in all of mine and they work fine, just limited to 137GB.

By: Esteban Galvan

Esteban Galvan — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:01:05 +0000

When booting FreeBSD 8.x disk on the V100 server using a disk larger than 137Gb you will get a message:

atapci0: using PIO transfers above 137GB as workaround for 48bit DMA access bug, expect reduced performance

So, it’s possible install and user larger disks, but as the message says, you will fall in PIO mode, that means slow performance, for a small storage maybe it can helps.

There’s a note on the release docs on the FreeBSD site about this:

http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/CURRENT/relnotes/i386/new.html

“The ata(4) driver now supports a workaround for some controllers whose DMA does not work properly in 48bit mode. For affected controllers, PIO mode will be used for access to areas beyond 137GB. [MERGED]”

Hope this helps

By: ED

ED — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 14:47:01 +0000

V100 using 300GB IDE Drive (Maxtor MAX 10 7.2K)

By: Scott Alan Miller

Scott Alan Miller — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:19:52 +0000

Interesting, would not expect this to work. Which hardware did you try this on?

By: ED

ED — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 20:09:13 +0000

Somebody seems to have solved the problem.

http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=1905854&tstart=45

To Quote:

First of all, purchase a IDE to CF adapter.
Fit the adapter in master mode to the DVD-ROM cable. Make sure the DVD is selected as the slave device via the jumper on the back of the DVD drive.
Fit a compact flash drive of 2,4 or even 8GB to the adapter. Any more is not needed.
Power on the platform and adjust the OBP boot device variable to make the default boot device the CF module. (/pci@1f,0/ide@d/disk@2,0). Issue the command “setenv boot-device disk2” to perform this.

Then adjust the device alias of the DVD drive to now be the the slave device. (/pci@1f,0/ide@d/cdrom@3,0:f). Issue the command “nvalias cdrom /pci@1f,0/ide@d/cdrom@3,0:f” to perform this.
Issue the command “setenv use-nvramrc? true” to make the above command work on next reboot.

Issue the command “reset-all” to save these settings.
Now place your Nevada or OpenSolaris (MilaX) CD/DVD into the DVD-ROM drive and boot it.

Install Nevada or OpenSolaris to the CF module.
Issue the command:
“zpool create array c0t0d0 c0t1d0”

ZFS “should” then relabel the disks GPT (EFI), use 148GB per disk and create a stripe of 296GB already mounted as /array . (Valid for 160GB drives and probably higher capacity.)
Worked for me but with slightly different hardware.