[Gllug] SATA card recommendations.

Andrew Farnsworth farnsaw at stonedoor.com
Thu Oct 2 12:31:12 UTC 2008


On Thu Oct  2  1:58 , John Winters <john at sinodun.org.uk> sent:

>Benjamin Donnachie wrote:
>> I'd be grateful for recommendations for inexpensive PCI SATA cards
>> that work fully under Linux AND support 1TB drives.
>
>Errrk!  Does this mean that the hardware/firmware/interface designers
>have put artificial limits on drive size again!?!  Don't they ever
>learn?  How many times is it now?

There will always be "Artificial Limits" in cases like these.  As long as we
limit the address space to a certain number of bits, be it 8, 16, 20, 30, 32, or
64 bits, there will be a limit.  All we can do is try to make the limits so large
we won't reach them any time soon.  Like IPv6... rather than going from 32 bit
for IPv4 up to 64 bits and risking hitting the wall again, they decided to jump
right to 128 bits.  This was a good choice because using 128 bits as an unsigned
integer, you can use numbers from zero up to
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 (i.e. 2^128).  If you divide
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 by 790,653,726,720,000,000
(the approximate surface area of the earth in square inches) that implies you can
assign over 3,700,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses per square inch of the
earth's surface. That should be enough addresses for most requirements, even if
you stack those servers sky high.

Andy
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