PERC 6i and Incorrect drive size

[Patrick_Boyd at Dell.com]

The PERC controller reserves some space to store RAID metadata. This data allows you to move drives from one controller to another, such as in the case of controller failure.

-----Original Message-----
From: Elazar Broad [mailto:elazar at hushmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, October 04, 2008 10:20 PM
To: linux-poweredge-Lists; Boyd, Patrick
Subject: RE: PERC 6i and Incorrect drive size

Hi Patrick,
 Thanks for the reply. I am aware of that. My issue is more of how 
the PERC controller reports the drive size to the OS. Like so: If I 
plug one of the drives into the PowerEdge 1800's onboard CERC2/s 
controller, fdisk reports the drive as having 640.1GB/1,250,263,728 
sectors. On the other hand, fdisk on a PERC6i virtual disk(RAID1) 
reports 639.5GB/1,249,116,159 sectors. What I want to know is, why 
is there 500MB+ missing when using the PERC6i controller? 
Additionally, on a clean install of VMWare's ESXi the included 
partedUtil complains about the geometry reported by the 
controller's BIOS.

Elazar  

On Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:35:48 +0000 Patrick_Boyd at Dell.com wrote:
>The drive manufactures measure drive size in base 10, i.e. a KB is 
>1000
>bytes, a MB is 1000 KB, and a GB is 1000 MB.
>
>Software measures drive size in base 2, i.e. a KB is 1024 bytes, a 
>MB is
>1024 KB, and a GB is 1024 MB.
>
>That is the discrepancy that you are seeing.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com
>[mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at dell.com] On Behalf Of Elazar 
>Broad
>Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 3:27 AM
>To: linux-poweredge-Lists
>Subject: PERC 6i and Incorrect drive size
>
>I know this is slightly off topic. I have a PERC 6i in a PE1800, I 
>
>have 2 WD 640GB drives connected to the controller. When booting, 
>if I hit Ctrl+R to access the configuration utility, both drives 
>only show as 609620MB as opposed to 640000. Any ideas are greatly 
>appreciated...
>
>Elazar
>
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