eSATA support in RHEL55

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Hi,

I am new here and a newbee in Linux in general, since I am into Linux as this OS is preferred in bioinformatics. I acquired Dell PowerEdge 610 for this purpose that runs RHEL55. The intended jobs require storage and transfer of dozens GB of data, so storage space and speed of transfer is prime. I was surprised hoverer to find that the box cannot see external drives of more than 2 TB. The only suggestion I got is to upgrade to a new kernel. Is that the only option?
For 2 TB external drives, it seems that the only option is USB 2.0, which is supported. But what about eSATA? Internal drive interfaces said are SATA compliant, so I guess the kernel supports SATA drivers, but three is no eSATA connectors. Any advice on support of add-on boards?

Thanks,

VY
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Responses

andriusb's picture Red Hat Guru 3695 points
24 February 2012 4:18 AM

https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/9854

"How can I create filesystems greater than 2 Terabytes in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5?"

 

and

 

https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/articles/9816

"How do I create an ext3 filesystem greater than 8T on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5?"

 

The Red Hat Knowledgebase has lots more info on RHEL 5 - check it out! :-)

 

As for eSATA support, have you pinged Dell? This is very hardware-specific, and RHEL 5.5 was released quite a while ago...

 

Let us know if you have any follow-ups...

 

Regards,

 

Andrius

Red Hat, Inc.

VY Community Member 22 points
27 February 2012 3:39 AM

Well, I guess I did not ask the right question. The 3TB drive came formatted with NTFS and it is perfectly recognizable by WinXP. My RHEL55, SciLinux5 and Centos5 servers all have ntfs-3g installed, but they all can see only 2TB NTFS drives. Followng KnowlegeBase articles mentioned means I need to reformat the 3TB drive as ext3. But then I will not be able to use drives with WinXP, only over network with Samba, but this will cut the speed to whatever network allows. At this time transfers over our corporate network are not even close to USB2.0, so I want to avoid going away from NTFS. I was told that Red Hat does not support NTFS, but I want to know whether the problem with drives over 2TB comes from the kernel or it is specific to current version of ntfs-3g. General opinion in the Linux community was that I have to upgrade to a newer kernel. Is that correct?

andriusb's picture Red Hat Guru 3695 points
29 February 2012 5:17 AM

I'm not quite sure what upgrading the kernel gets you if it gets all its instructions about NTFS from the third-party package/kernel module. This definitely sounds like a question for the fuse-ntfs-3g upstream community instead, given this package isn't included in RHEL and Red Hat folks probably have little insight into this package as well.

 

Andrius

Red Hat, Inc.