6
1
I recently upgraded a home-built external hard drive from 1TB to 3TB. In doing so, I learned that it's bridge board doesn't support drives larger than 2TB. I had to get a newer case in order to support this drive.
Does anyone know why this should be true?
From the standpoint of the SATA interface, there should be no problem. The LBA-28 system of identifying blocks imposed a 128GiB limit (assuming the usual 512 byte blocks), but that hasn't been a serious concern for over 10 years. Everything since then (including all SATA devices) supports LBA-48, which tops out at 128PiB and therefore should easily support 3TB.
I am aware of the MBR partition table issue with its 2TB limit, but that shouldn't affect a SATA-USB bridge chip, since it is (or should be) just translating disk blocks between two protocols.
I'm thinking that this might simply be a case of chip makers getting lazy, using 32-bit integers for an application that really needs to support 48-bit values. Is it really that simple (and IMO, inexcusable) or is there something else I'm missing?
Just curious, but I haven't been able to Google an answer from anywhere yet.
1Same story with many many RAID controllers. An awful lot of cheaper/older ones can only support 2TB volumes because of the same limitation. – Mark Henderson – 2013-07-22T21:52:52.070