External USB 2.0/3.0 HDD max size.

English Hardware
#1

Hello,

From what I read on this website, for a Suse 12.3 32 bits, the max size for a hard drive is 16 TB, it doesn’t specify which file format. I plan to buy a Western Digital external HDD, either the model ‘MyBook’ or ‘Elements’, there are both 3TB and 4 TB models, they are formatted for WXp in NTFS which means I’ll have to re-format the drive in EXT4 and probably leave a small partition of 300GB in NTFS for whatever need arises.

So I like to ask your experience with these external HDD drives and if I’m right about the size Suse 12.3 is capable of using. On the forums here, I only found some questions about Suse not recognizing the HDD some times.

OS Linux 3.7.10-1.16 OpenSuse 12.3 (Darthmouth) (i586)
KDE 4.10.5 ‘release 1’

Processor: P4 2.8 Ghz
RAM: 2 GB

Thank you

#2

On 2013-12-13 17:26, mhunt0 wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> From what I read on this website, for a Suse 12.3 32 bits, the max size
> for a hard drive is 16 TB, it doesn’t specify which file format.

Which website? Please give a link to the page that says that.

> So I like to ask your experience with these external HDD drives and if
> I’m right about the size Suse 12.3 is capable of using. On the forums
> here, I only found some questions about Suse not recognizing the HDD
> some times.

I’m not aware of any size limit - except the 3 TiB for MBR. You have to
format as GPT.

Notice that: 3 TiB ≠ 3 TB

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

#3

Oops… it reads TiB… not TB… my bad, it was read here:

https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles11/singlehtml/stor_admin/stor_admin.html#sec_filesystems_major

so, there are no limits on the HDD USB ? even in a 32bit system

#4

On 2013-12-13 22:56, mhunt0 wrote:
>
> Oops… it reads TiB… not TB… my bad, it was read here:
>
> http://tinyurl.com/ks44t9m

(Notice that is a SLES docu, while this here is openSUSE. Not the same
thing).

What paragraph?

For instance, I read:

+++····························
1.4 Large File Support

Originally, Linux supported a maximum file size of 2 GiB (231 bytes).
Unless a file system comes with large file support, the maximum file
size on a 32-bit system is 2 GiB.
····························+±

Which is not true, as I have a 32 bit machines by my side which I use to
download DVDs over 4 GiB.

I remember the LFS support was something important several years ago, we
talked a lot about that at the time.

And I see no reference to USB storage in the whole page.

> so, there are no limits on the HDD USB ? even in a 32bit system

There are limits, but I don’t see where exactly you read that, so I can
not comment on them.

There is a limit on 2 TiB if you use traditional partitions. As 2TB is
less that 2 TIB, a 2 TB disk unit has no problems.

Maybe you refer to this:

+++····························
IMPORTANT:Table 1-3 describes the limitations regarding the on-disk
format. The Linux kernel imposes its own limits on the size of files and
file systems handled by it. These are as follows:

File Size

On 32-bit systems, files cannot exceed 2 TiB (2⁴¹ bytes).
File System Size

File systems can be up to 2⁷³ bytes in size. However, this limit is
still out of reach for the currently available hardware.
····························+±

The 2 TiB limit is the limit on a single FILE, not on the disk.

Or maybe you refer to table 1-4? There is a 16 TiB limit there, “per
block device” on 32 bit arch. Well, that is way over 3 TiB, so no
problem for you.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

#5

yep, my mistake, sorry, I’ll get the HDD next year since I always avoid this end-of-year craziness.

I was referring to the max hdd capacity (not file size), since, for example, my PC can only handle internal PCI hard drives of 120 GB, but since USB devices are suppose to be different but wanted to make sure before investing in a 3TB hdd.

thank you

#6

On 2013-12-14 00:16, mhunt0 wrote:
>
> yep, my mistake, sorry, I’ll get the HDD next year since I always avoid
> this end-of-year craziness.
>
> I was referring to the max hdd capacity (not file size), since, for
> example, my PC can only handle internal PCI hard drives of 120 GB, but
> since USB devices are suppose to be different but wanted to make sure
> before investing in a 3TB hdd.

PCI drives? I’m not sure about that, but on IDE/pATA/sATA that doesn’t
mean a thing for Linux. The problem is booting, after that Linux handles it.

I have old computers which came with 2 gigs hard disks on which I put
disks of hundreds of gigs, absolutely not supported by the board bios.

The only thing that is needed is that all the pins are connected, Linux
does not use the BIOS for accessing them.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

#7

thanks! that’s a relief, I guess I’ll know more when I buy the thing next year :slight_smile:

#8

On 2013-12-14 05:36, mhunt0 wrote:
>
> thanks! that’s a relief, I guess I’ll know more when I buy the thing
> next year :slight_smile:

I have some old notes about hard disk limits, taken from a Seagate paper:

2.11GB or 4095 cylinder limitation
3.26GB or 6322 cylinder limitation
4.22GB or 8192 cylinder limitation
8.45GB (7.8 GiB) Standard INT13 limitation (CHS[1024x256x63]x512)
33.8GB (31.5 GiB) or 66,060,287 LBAs limitation
137.4GB (128 GiB) or 268,435,455 LBAs limitation (28-bit limit)

Your 120 limit you mention is perhaps the 128 GiB limit above. At this
moment I don’t remember if that was a BIOS problem or hardware problem.
Your computer must be ancient if it is affected by that one.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

#9

I am reading that linked document as showing the file system size limit to be 16 EiB, not 16TiB. And an EiB seems to be around a million TiB, if I am reading that correctly.

#10

On 2013-12-14 15:26, nrickert wrote:

> I am reading that linked document as showing the file system size limit
> to be 16 EiB, not 16TiB. And an EiB seems to be around a million TiB,
> if I am reading that correctly.

Table 1-4, probably.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

#11

oh yes, it’s ancient. It’s a Dell Precision 340. ONly 1 CPU at 2.8 and 2 Gigs of RAM, but the hardware is solid, except for the original hard drive, no hardware trouble. I can play DCU Online at 1600x1200 with no lag, problems I had in the past has been software related.

Anyway, the limit of 120 GB in the IDE/PCI main hard drive may come from the BIOS since I was using Windows last time I changed the hard drives. I still have an XP partition for those games, but main work OS is Suse, it’ll be great if Suse doesn’t has the BIOS limits and can address bigger hard drives.

#12

then I guess I’ll be safe at 2 or 3 TB with that USB HDD.

#13

On 2013-12-14 17:26, mhunt0 wrote:

> oh yes, it’s ancient. It’s a Dell Precision 340. ONly 1 CPU at 2.8 and
> 2 Gigs of RAM, but the hardware is solid, except for the original hard
> drive, no hardware trouble. I can play DCU Online at 1600x1200 with no
> lag, problems I had in the past has been software related.
>
> Anyway, the limit of 120 GB in the IDE/PCI main hard drive may come from
> the BIOS since I was using Windows last time I changed the hard drives.
> I still have an XP partition for those games, but main work OS is Suse,
> it’ll be great if Suse doesn’t has the BIOS limits and can address
> bigger hard drives.

If the problem is the Bios, then it only affects booting with that
drive. It has been long ago since I touch these problems, but if the
hardware was ok (some manufacturers did not connect all the pins), with
some of those limits you could simply put a separate boot partition
below the limit, and Linux would start fine. In some cases, we made sure
that Windows and the small boot partition were below the limit, so both
worked. Once started, Linux could access huge spaces beyond that point.
If the problem was Bios, ie, software.

And anyway, that limit is only for the internal drive.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)

#14

yes, thank you. I’ll tell of my experience next year when I get the USB hdd.

#15

On 12/14/2013 10:26 AM, mhunt0 wrote:
>
> robin_listas;2608177 Wrote:
>> On 2013-12-14 05:36, mhunt0 wrote:
>>>
>>> thanks! that’s a relief, I guess I’ll know more when I buy the thing
>>> next year :slight_smile:
>>
>> I have some old notes about hard disk limits, taken from a Seagate
>> paper:
>>
>> 2.11GB or 4095 cylinder limitation
>> 3.26GB or 6322 cylinder limitation
>> 4.22GB or 8192 cylinder limitation
>> 8.45GB (7.8 GiB) Standard INT13 limitation (CHS[1024x256x63]x512)
>> 33.8GB (31.5 GiB) or 66,060,287 LBAs limitation
>> 137.4GB (128 GiB) or 268,435,455 LBAs limitation (28-bit limit)
>>
>> Your 120 limit you mention is perhaps the 128 GiB limit above. At this
>> moment I don’t remember if that was a BIOS problem or hardware problem.
>> Your computer must be ancient if it is affected by that one.
>>
>> –
>> Cheers / Saludos,
>>
>> Carlos E. R.
>> (from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)
>
>
> oh yes, it’s ancient. It’s a Dell Precision 340. ONly 1 CPU at 2.8 and
> 2 Gigs of RAM, but the hardware is solid, except for the original hard
> drive, no hardware trouble. I can play DCU Online at 1600x1200 with no
> lag, problems I had in the past has been software related.
>
> Anyway, the limit of 120 GB in the IDE/PCI main hard drive may come from
> the BIOS since I was using Windows last time I changed the hard drives.
> I still have an XP partition for those games, but main work OS is Suse,
> it’ll be great if Suse doesn’t has the BIOS limits and can address
> bigger hard drives.

Linux only uses the BIOS to load grub or grub2. If your BIOS is limited to 128
GB, then you want to be careful that the partition with the boot data lies below
the 128 GB point. If you violate the 128 GB boundary, the partitioner code will
warn you. Most of us can ignore the warning, but you might not be able to.

On x86/x86_64, Linux uses 4KB blocks and has the following volume and file size
limits:


Type         Max Vol            Max File
ext2/3       16 TiB              2 TiB
ext4         1 EiB (16 TiB rec) 16 TiB
btrfs        16 EiB              8 EiB

As the current disk maximum size is 8 TiB, any of these file systems will handle
the largest disk available for some time.

#16

Hi mhunt0,

Although it’s probably fair to say that no disk drive manufacturer is perfect, you might want to research very completely and carefully, before you buy an external WD ( Western Digital ) drive, especially if you have any interest in booting from it, and I’m not talking about an issue with the drive’s capacity.

I should say, that when I first heard some of the second hand information that I’m about to mention, I was very skeptical. But after experiencing the situation first hand, I no longer am.

WRT to some of WD’s external drives, some people have ostensibly been told by WD, that WD doesn’t support booting from some external drives. As a more specific example, some people on various websites have complained that they’d had problems booting from external WD Passport drives, and been told by WD that booting was not supported by WD, on external Passport drives.

I was having all sorts of strange problems booting from a WD Elements external drive. On general principle I was concerned, but not a great deal, because I didn’t have a Passport drive. Even then, as long as the MBR, partition table, etc., can be written and read, what would be the problem, on general principles, with booting from the drive? Maybe if there was something in a specific situation that, caused a particular BIOS to incorrectly identify the drive, I could see it. Or perhaps if the firmware in the drive enclosure did not allow full access to the drive itself, there could be a problem booting. In my case, I was able to partition the drive, write and read the MBR, etc. So it sure seemed that booting shouldn’t be a problem.

Previously I was using the drive with oS ( openSUSE ) 11.4 as just external space for backing stuff up, offloading stuff, etc.

Instead, with one of the oS 12.* series systems, I started trying to boot when the system was entirely on the external WD Elements drive. One confusing aspect of trying to boot from my external WD Elements drive, was that something involved with identifying the drive, kept producing what seemed like a totally artificial Model ID and Serial ID.

Eventually I realized that sometime after oS 11.4, the method used by oS to ID drives seemingly was changed. If my WD Elements drive was asked to ID itself by one mechanism, the firmware in the enclosure grabbed the request, and provided the Model ID, Serial ID, etc., that are on the outside of the enclosure, those from the “Elements” branding. Those were what I was so used to seeing in the /dev/disk/by-id directory tree with oS 11.4. If a different mechanism was used, the ID request was passed through to the drive itself, which identified itself by a different Model ID and Serial ID. Those ID’s are in fact from a Passport drive!

I don’t know if what WD did, is something that WD did intentionally for reasons of financial advantage, marketing, testing, or if it was a manufacturing mistake. But it is what it is. Even if WD was going to do something like that, I would have thought it might be better to use some undocumented instruction to tell the firmware to allow direct access to the drive itself for testing purposes by WD. Once it was time to ship the drive, I would think it should have been set to operate in a single consistent mode. In fact, I’ve sometimes purchased bare drives, put them in an external enclosure of my own choosing, and had no issues booting from the drive.

I’ve been able to boot all sorts of Operating Systems, with all sorts of boot loaders, from all sorts of internal and external drives, on this machine. Yet, even apart from the ID issue, I never did get one of the oS 12.* series systems booting from that drive, when the system was entirely contained on that drive.

My WD Elements external drive, was a 1 TB unit. If someone else can say that they’ve been able to boot one of the oS 12.* series systems with the same model drive, then maybe the issue was just a manufacturing glitch with the particular drive I had, a problem with this machine, or a brain glitch on my part, and there’s nothing to worry about. Otherwise, I would want to have a thorough talk with WD before buying one of their external drives again.

For myself, either way, I would still consider a WD internal drive.

HTH.

#17

On Fri, 13 Dec 2013 16:26:01 +0000, mhunt0 wrote:

> So I like to ask your experience with these external HDD drives and if
> I’m right about the size Suse 12.3 is capable of using. On the forums
> here, I only found some questions about Suse not recognizing the HDD
> some times.

I’ve got an external Seagate “Backup Plus” 4 TB USB 2/3 drive and an
external Western Digital “MyBook” 2 TB USB drive, both on openSUSE 13.1
and working fine. I had used the 2 TB drive on 12.2 as well.

Both are formatted ext4 and work fine.

Jim

Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C

#18

Thank you for all this information, I also read previously that people had trouble booting from WD external hdd.

Luckily, I have no intentions of booting from the external hdd, I’ll use it as a simple back up and storage device. Because I work with graphics, I need a big place to put many images files, PDFs, video clips, textures, etc…
and backups of ‘raw’ WIP projects where each file can be anywhere from 50MB to over 100MB.

I can’t use another internal HD simple because all power cords from the PS are in use, so I have to use one external hdd and it’ll be turned on during work sessions (several hours) or when doing the back up of a work session.

I also been reading about which file format is best, some people had some trouble using Ext_x and suggest XFL.

#19

Thank you for hte info, do you use it only as back up or is it turned on trough the day ?

#20

On 2013-12-16 22:36, mhunt0 wrote:
> I also been reading about which file format is best, some people had
> some trouble using Ext_x and suggest XFL.

XFS, I suppose :slight_smile:

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 12.3 x86_64 “Dartmouth” at Telcontar)