Supermicro PDSME+ (ICH7R) and X7DBR-8 (ESB2) 2 TB limitation

[s.eremin]

Hello! I have two old Supermicro servers: one with a PDSME+ motherboard and an integrated ICH7R controller, and another one with an X7DBR-8 motherboard and an ESB2 controller. I would like to use any one of them as a file server by creating a RAID 10 array of 4 new HDDs 4 TB each. I have the latest BIOS firmware from Supermicro in both servers. Both servers detect only about 1600 GB of disk space on each HDD and allow creation of a RAID array not larger than 2 TB. As far as I understood from other posts on this forum, there is no way to mod BIOS ROMs on these old controllers to overcome this limitation. But could you please confirm this, Fernando?

[Fernando]

@s.eremin :
Welcome to the Win-RAID Forum!

@s.eremin

I would like to use any one of them as a file server by creating a RAID 10 array of 4 new HDDs 4 TB each. I have the latest BIOS firmware from Supermicro in both servers. Both servers detect only about 1600 GB of disk space on each HDD and allow creation of a RAID array not larger than 2 TB. As far as I understood from other posts on this forum, there is no way to mod BIOS ROMs on these old controllers to overcome this limitation. But could you please confirm this, Fernando?

I confirm it. Only Intel RAID systems with a Southbridge from ICH8R up have a DEV_2822 Intel SATA RAID Controller and are able to handle >2 TB sized RAID Volumes (pre-condition: an Intel RST RAID ROM module from v10.5 up has to be within the BIOS).

Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)