G-Speed 2TB Limit and Tech Support issues
by David Eger
on
Jan 19, 2009 at 10:29:32 pm
So here is the Problem:
I have a 6TB 6 bay G-Speed SCSI RAID after finally getting through to someone that could help me connect to the GUI we set it up as raid 5 so this should give me around 5 TB we also set it to be able to report the full capacity under OSX ( I did this with the Travis the product specialist) I let the drive initialize then restarted then formatted it with the disk utility osx extended journaled and still the drive only reports 2 TB in the operating system. What am I doing wrong here?
My Tech Support Problem is now I cannot get anything buy Travis' voice mail and I guess he doesn't feel the need to call me back. It has been almost 2 weeks of me leaving VM for the guy. At least he or someone from the company should get back to me I mean I paid enough for this Raid I should get some support right?
I mean honestly if I knew that the drive would not report more then 2TB but I could send up to the 5 TB or whatever it is after Raid 5 then I really would not care much at this point and would be able to start using the thing but I don't want it to tell me it is full when there is 3TB of space that I paid for that I cannot write to.. I mean If I wanted 2TB I would have bought 2TB right.
Re: G-Speed 2TB Limit and Tech Support issues by David Eger on Jan 21, 2009 at 6:48:06 pm
okay, I have to say that after finally getting the chance to talk to Travis he worked really hard to get the problem resolved. It turned out that the ATTO card (UL5D) does not rescan the bus unless you tell it to so we just created a Raid 0 then rescanned the bus with the atto config program and Bam 5.5TB so now I am in the process of Redoing the drive as raid 5 then I will rescan the bus and it should be good..
Re: G-Speed 2TB Limit and Tech Support issues by John Knowles on Feb 18, 2009 at 11:01:05 pm
Hello Dave, I hope you're still checking the responses to this. Would you mind detailing exactly what steps you took? I have the exact same problem and I have the same ATTO card and a 3TB GSPEED.
Re: G-Speed 2TB Limit and Tech Support issues by David Eger on Feb 19, 2009 at 12:57:30 pm
The problem was that the Atto card does not rescan the bus everytime you restart or when the drive remounts so you go through all the stuff wait like half a day for the drive and all and it still reports wrong. if you open the Atto configuration tool then twirl down under host, then local host select the card and then click on the advanced tab, you will have the option to rescan the bus. click on that and you should be good to go. That is what fixed my problem. The drive then reported the full capacity and I just went to the disk utility and followed the rest of the directions to format the drive..
I have to give Kudos to Travis at G-tech because when I did finally get a hold of him he worked with me to get the problem resolved and actually was the one that figured out it was the card that was not automatically rescanning the bus.. He actually had given me a RMA to send the chassis back and I was right about to pull all the drives and pack it up when he called back with the solution.. (good timing Travis)
It took a few days to get it resolved because we kept changing things in the settings then having to re-configure the raid which took about 4hrs each time.. Being on opposite ends of the country, meant I could try one thing wait 4hrs. Call him try something else, then see if it worked the next morning.
Kind of a pain and thankfully I had my old Raid still up and running because in a deadline situation with this as my only egg in the basket I would have had some problems..
Good thing is that now this problem is documented and out there and may save some others the same headaches I had.
Re: G-Speed 2TB Limit and Tech Support issues by John Knowles on Feb 21, 2009 at 12:37:06 am
I currently have it striped as a RAID 5 and formatted as a Mac volume. Just so I'm clear on this, are you saying I need to:
1. Recreate the RAID set
2. Once it's created, restart and then use the RESCAN button to reveal the full capacity
3. Format in OSX
The last time I created the RAID set and looked up the drive in Disk Utility it only showed 2TB, so I want to make sure I know when to Rescan it for this to work.
Re: G-Speed 2TB Limit and Tech Support issues by David Eger on Feb 21, 2009 at 1:02:35 pm
that is what he had me do. But. Why don't you just rescan the bus and see if it comes up full capacity. He ad me do mine raid 0 and go through all the stuff then it reported 6tb then I had to make it raid 5 wait 4 hrs for initalization then rescan the bus and reformatt in disk utility. so just rescan the bus and go from there.. that is what I would do.
Re: G-Speed 2TB Limit and Tech Support issues by John Knowles on Feb 23, 2009 at 11:51:38 pm
Rescanning after it's been formatted doesn't work I'm afraid.
I rebuilt the RAID set today (RAID 5) and rescanned immediately afterwards; the drive only shows 2TB capacity in Disk Utility but shows 2.5TB in the web controller window. Multiple rescans and a restart have not changed the available size.
I have a call and an email in to Travis, hopefully he can help me through this like he did with you. You're right, he is very hard to get a hold of. :{
Re: G-Speed 2TB Limit and Tech Support issues by David Eger on Feb 24, 2009 at 12:55:45 pm
I think you may be good or close to it. at raid 0 I have a 6TB drive but at raid 5 it is like 4TB. you did enable the greater then 2TB support like they describe in the manual right?? I think "for Windows" Has changed to something else but it does the same thing.
But I think that you just only have 2Tb of space running Raid 5.
you figure there is always the space that is just lost on drives and then you are going to have one drive as the redundant drive so if you have a 6 bay populated with 500gb drives then it would format out to like 2.5 then you loose a drive to redundancy making the total 2TB. I have a 6 bay 6TB that I think was 5 at raid 0 and 4 at raid 5.
I will say that you might have something goofy going on if the web controller states you have 2.5 and you are only seeing 2TB. it sounds like something is not set right in the web controller.
Re: G-Speed 2TB Limit and Tech Support issues by John Knowles on Mar 2, 2009 at 8:59:11 pm
FIXED.
Finally got Travis on the horn over at G-Tech (Fabrik? Hitachi? G-Hitabrik??) and was able to troubleshoot it. I had made a RAID 0 set and was still showing 2TB so I knew there really was a problem. He had me change the 2TB support to "4K block", not "64 bit KBLA" and that did the trick; Disk Utility showed 2.7TB.
So just FYI, the manual claims the 'Over 2TB support' menu should be set to 'For Windows' but that selection doesn't exist. Set to 64bit unless you can't see your full capacity, then use 4K block.
