Product manual

Galaxy G3G12 / G3G16 - Installation and Hardware Reference Manual
241 Section 7 Technology Background
Ranges of Disk Array Expansion
The Windows 2000 and Windows XP (32-bit) operating systems support a 10-byte LBA format. As a result,
these OSes can only recognize 4 billion addresses. If you create a logical drive using the default 512 B
sector size, the logical drive will be limited to 2 TB of data, even if there is more space available on your disk
drives.
This limitation does not apply to Windows XP (64-bit), 2003 Server, Vista, and Linux OSes with the 2.6
kernel. Linux OSes with the 2.4 kernel do not support variable sector sizes, therefore you cannot apply the
solution described here to those OSes.
Note that once you create your logical drive, you cannot change the size of the sectors. Nor can you
increase the number of address blocks that the OS recognizes.
IMPORTANT!
Be aware that not all HBAs and their drivers are compatible
with the OS to use the over 2TB functionality.
You can direct GAM to expand a logical drive beyond the maximum expansion size. When the expansion is
finished:
• GAM will show the logical drive in the desired size.
• Your operating system might show the logical drive at the maximum size listed in the table below.
• Additional capacity might appear as unpartitioned and unformatted.
Current LD Size
Maximum LD
Expansion Size
Sector Size
8 to 16 TB 16 TB 4096 bytes
4 to 8 TB 8 TB 2048 bytes
2 to 4 TB 4 TB 1024 bytes
up to 2 TB 2 TB 512 bytes
At this point, you have the choice of:
• Format the unpartitioned/unformatted capacity as a
second logical drive
• Delete the existing disk array and create a new one in the desired size
Delete and Recreate
If you require a logical drive larger than the maximum expansion size:
1. Backup the data from the current logical drive.
2. Delete the current logical drive.
3. Create a new logical drive with the desired capacity.
4. Restore the data to the new logical drive.