Rumors are flying that higher capacity drives are on the horizon. According to The Register last week, 3TB drives are inevitable but the real question is are you ready for hard drive capacities greater than 2.1TB?
System builders beware! You must ensure your infrastructure is ready to support these higher capacity drives.
Some of the basic design decisions made in the original computer architecture left the industry with inherent limitations. One of those limitations is the ability to address hard drives that exceed capacities of 2.1TB. The decision was made back in 1980 to limit the LBA (logical block address) range to 2.1TB – more than enough capacity in those early days. However, with the vast amounts of digital content we’re serving up today, we’re now faced with operating systems, BIOS controllers, HDD controllers and device drivers that use the same basic limitation of 2.1TB for the maximum size of a hard drive or logical storage device. Long LBA addressing (LLBA) is needed. LLBA extends the number of bytes used in a Command Descriptor Block (a data structure used to format data passed between host computers and hard drives) to allow access to an LBA range that exceeds the 2.1TB limitation.
If high capacities are in your future, I highly recommend you check with your software and hardware suppliers on their plans for implementing Long LBAs today.
[...] Inside IT Storage – Enterprise All Hands on Deck. Big Caps are Coming! [...]
[...] A 2.5-in drive could also be used in data centers to further reduce floor space requirements. Before… [...]
[...] side, and enterprise storage is not immune. For more on this check out Dave Burks post on 4K, and Barbara Craig’s post on the 2.1TB [...]
Are unsupported old hardwares LLBA-usable with coreboot or something?
http://www.coreboot.org/
You should get some facts right here, because other sites already citing this article.
First of all, the currently used (48Bit)LBA* is capable of addressing 128PiB (peta binary byte) with common 512byte sector sizes. By using 4k sectors (as newer Western Digital drives do) this limit will be raised by factor 8 (8*128PiB = 1024PiB = 1EiB).
So the problem here isn’t LBA itself but their implementation in older 32Bit based operation systems (including BIOS). While older 32Bit OSes address 48Bit LBA as 32Bit value (thus limiting usable lba to 2TiB) modern 64Bit OSes do it right by using the full 48Bit.
And by using 4K drives instead, the mentiond 2TiB limit will be raised to 16TiB.
*) introduced in ATA-6 spec