Intel drivers for > 2TB drives

Wait, wait, wait... So you're telling me the previous versions of the drivers didn't support drives larger than 2TB?
 
Why would they necessarily comply? The 3TB drives are quite new to the market. Do you use ICH RAID?
 
Well... Why would you have a 2TB limitation in your drivers? It's not like the SATA spec topped out at 2TB.

When a 4TB drive comes out will newer drivers be needed because this driver only supports up to 3TB? Typically when you write a low level driver you try to support the spec in full, not only up to what's currently made unless you're lazy or in a rush.
 
Stereodude said:
Well... Why would you have a 2TB limitation in your drivers? It's not like the SATA spec topped out at 2TB.

When a 4TB drive comes out will newer drivers be needed because this driver only supports up to 3TB? Typically when you write a low level driver you try to support the spec in full, not only up to what's currently made unless you're lazy or in a rush.
Click to expand...

I have to agree with that. LBA48 addressing which has been around for quite a while now (ATA-6 added LBA48 addressing in 2003, which SATA is a superset of) can address 2^48 sectors, and even with 512byte sectors that's 128 PB (aka 134217728 GB) addressable.

So if you say your controller is 100% LBA48 compliant or SATA compliant, then so should your drivers. (and that includes being able to address 2^48 sectors).

I guess it comes down to MS's braindead spec and backward compatibility, that only allows 32bits for the sector location. (And that is one of the reasons for the introduction of 4K sector sizes).
 
Bozo said:
Could these drivers be more for the new sector size rather than disk capacity?
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Without seeing a detailed Change log, it could be a fair assumption. Also could be for compatibility issues (aka poor implementation with HDDs) in regards to the new sector size, especially for those drives that don't report either physical or logical sector size correctly. (ATA-8 spec includes formalised methods for determining logical to physical sector ratios, for those drives that are 4K physical sectors but still report 512 sector sizes).
 
Stereodude said:
Well... Why would you have a 2TB limitation in your drivers? It's not like the SATA spec topped out at 2TB.

When a 4TB drive comes out will newer drivers be needed because this driver only supports up to 3TB? Typically when you write a low level driver you try to support the spec in full, not only up to what's currently made unless you're lazy or in a rush.
Click to expand...

Lot of assumptions there. Specs and standards change, implementations, change, and manufacturers don't always follow the rules. I'm not convinced that the LBA addressing is the only difference in modern drives.
 
LunarMist said:
Lot of assumptions there. Specs and standards change, implementations, change, and manufacturers don't always follow the rules. I'm not convinced that the LBA addressing is the only difference in modern drives.
Click to expand...
Where are the assumptions? What spec or standard changed with the roll out of 3TB drives?
 
I'm not sure what your beef is but nearly 30 years of product develpo4ment puts me on Intel's side in this case. Releasing a free support product to the public long before the existence of the product it is intended to be used with often causes trouble. In a perfect world the specs, standards, quality agreements and supply agreements between the various hardware and software vendors should ensure that everything works just fine, but that is not the real world. If your business is selling some millions of hardware units perhaps you would have earlier access and/or input into drivers. Did you contact Intel about the drivers?
 
Quote from HardOCP which was apparently quoted from Intel:

"Intel® Rapid Storage Technology, version 10.1 adds support for hard disk drives with capacities greater than 2 terabytes in AHCI mode. It is important to note that booting to these larger capacity hard drives also requires an operating system and UEFI BIOS that supports booting to a GPT partition. If the system does not meet these requirements, these large capacity drives may only be used as secondary storage. Intel is planning to add RAID mode support for these large capacity hard drives in a future release."
 
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