>2TB logical drive support on RAID Card

Question

I have just bought the LSI MegaRAID SAS 8204ELP off eBay and have been looking at the specs of it. It says that it has support for >2TB logical drive. Now, forgive me if I'm stupid, but does this mean that any RAID array can be over 2TB or that it supports 2TB and above sized drives.

Answer 1

The logical part would suggest that the drive you end up with can exceed 2TB, rather than supporting the actual use of 2TB drives.

I cannot find any documentation on their site regarding the support of 4KB sectors or >2TB drives, the date of the latest BIOS on their site could mean they do support the technologies, but there's no way to really tell without raising the question to their support people.

http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/internal_raid/megaraid_sas/megaraid_sas_8204elp/

=EDIT=

Some light reading on 4KB sectors that may affect the drives you buy:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-4k-sector,2554.html

The key thing you need to know as a user is:

The Performance Trap

If 512 byte data has to be written across two physical 4KB blocks, the hard drive will have to read the 4KB blocks that are affected, introduce the modifications, and write them back onto the drive. This process is referred to as read-modify-write (RMW). While this doesn’t hurt much if it happens here and there, it becomes a significant issue if the alignment of eight 512 byte sectors into only one physical 4KB block is wrong. Therefore WD offers either its Alignment software (information and downloads can be found here), which rearranges all data on a hard drive to fit the logical 512 byte sectors into the physical 4KB sectors.