# 3TB Disks



## b0redom (Jan 15, 2011)

Is anyone using FreeBSD with the 3TB disks yet? I'm interested in possibly downsizing my hardware (I currently have a 8x1.5TB RAID-Z2 array) in a hulking server box, which I guess I could replace witha (newly bought) HP Microserver and 4x3TB drives in RAID-Z.

Regards...

b0redom


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## User23 (Jan 26, 2011)

Hitachi 7K3000

This drive is looking good. I used the 1 and 2 TB models before with ZFS and i will use the 3TB as well.

+ positive:
native 512 blocks
24/7 certified
5 year warranty
good price

- negative:
not the best performance (i guess, because the 1 and 2TB models wasnt the fastest too  )


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## jalla (Jan 26, 2011)

Bigger disks can be a mixed blessing. Keep in mind the first rule of raid performance: the more spindles, the better speed.

Also, rebuild time in case of failure increase proportionally with the bigger disk size, and consequently increase the possibilty of loosing the whole vdev in case a second disk should fail.


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## SirDice (Jan 28, 2011)

A few things to consider (although I don't think they're important for the OP). 

Not all BIOS' can detect more then 2TB. Also note that the 'standard' MBR partitioning scheme is also limited to 2TB.


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## tingo (Jan 29, 2011)

Whether the BIOS does detect the right size of a disk or not shouldn't matter as long as FreeBSD can boot from it. After FreeBSD has booted, the BIOS isn't involved in disk access at all. I've seen this in real life too, a few times. The first time it was on an old machine; BIOS thought that a 40 GB disk was 320 Megabytes or so. Still FreeBSD booted and recognized the correct size of the disk.


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