XigmaNAS

I am currently using a test bed of 3x 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives with a 3Ware 9650SE-12ML RAID controller.

My question is this. When I have the 3 drives in Single Disk mode. NAS4Free automatically "divide" each hdd to da1 and da2...and so on to da6. da1 would be about 2TB and then da2 being the rest around 700GB. And it does this to all three drive so I end up having da1-da6.

Is this normal? I would think it could recognize it a full 2.7TB.

Am I missing a step here?

Now for kicks, I decided to go back in and create a hardware RAID5 using the same disks. Booting in to NAS4Free it divided it to da1-da3. da1 and da2 both have a 2TB space and then da3 1.5TB.

Looks to me that NAS4Free is doing this and not the controller. If my assumption is correct.

OH and the 3Ware BIOS is the latest that support 4TB (4.10.0.0.27). The BIOS on the 3Ware does recognize each drive as 2.7TB

Any help would be great.

I solved my own problem. By default the 3Ware 9650SE BIOS has the Auto-Carving Enabled. which automatically "carve" the drive to 2TB to help older OSes. Disabling this made NAS4Free see the entire disk as a whole.

Never heard of that one before. But it makes sense.

For ZFS, you might want to use 'JBOD' mode. I think you press J or something to put the board into that mode while in the 3ware BIOS drive config screen. Don't change it if you already have a pool running on it, but keep it in mind for the future.