z800 Maximum storage space

[lprows]

I have a z800 Workstation that currently has  2 - 2TB mirrored HDD's and 512 GB SSD program file drive.  I tried to install to WD 6 TB Black HDD and the maximum capacity I can get out of them is 1.5TB each.  Can this machine handle these two WD HDD's? I have talked to WD and they went through their usual protocal changing the drive initialization to gtb, but that yielded no change.  Any help would be appreciated.

[banhien]

Hi,

WD people should know how because they make the product. Please check their forum:

        https://community.wd.com/t/6tb-red-win-7-64bit-only-recognizes-1-5gb/17502/4

Regards.

[MrM3kon]

Ive just found out the hard way... max disk size supported ont he z800 is 2tb!  I never even give it a second thought and was wanting to put my 3x4tb storage disks in there, but found out I could only do this if I purchased a PCIe card.  Not the end of the world as you can pick 4 port ones up for around £30/40

[eunosm3]

Whoa, wait a minute.  I am also dealing with the 2TB limit.  @MrM3kon: your 2016-12-19 post implies that Z800 owners can utilize HDDs greater than 2TB using a PCIe card.  This intrigues me because it seems like a quick and easy solution to the size limit.  What sort of PCIe card?

[SDH]

Timely.... you can use 3TB drives just fine on the Z400, Z600, Z800 workstations.... I don't know about those 6TB WD drives.

If you want 3TB that is proven to work on the ZX00 generation I'd go to eBay and search out a SATA2 3TB drive like I did, or buy a HP brand SATA3 3TB drive that has the special HP firmware installed that lets the SATA3 drives work reliably in a SATA2 type of HP workstation (which the xw and ZX00 generations of workstations are).  HP has clearly explained that not all non-HP SATA3 drives will work in their SATA2 generation workstations.

Take a look  HERE.

And, below are some notes I made when I originally bought this drive new off eBay.  As a SATA2 type of drive it should be compatible with your ZX00 workstations even if the drive did not come from HP originally.  I personally always do the long DBAN low level of reformatting on a drive bought used off eBay, and I did that also for this drive because it came as a server drive with strangeness on its boot sectors that kept it from being identified by my workstation.  The 3TB drives all will need a GPT partition to be seen as a single partition, and thereafter I always do a long type of NTFS format to map out any bad sectors.  I have read that does not happen with a Quick type NTFS format.

All that will take you a few days, so be willing to take the time to do it right.  I'd do this inside the workstation so you have proper cooling over this long run.  I, also, have an external StarTech drive dock with a fan that blows over the drive in place externally (USB and eSATA interfaces).  I'm probably being overly compulsive about DBAN but it has solved issues that nothing else has.  Here are those old notes:

Same as: 614826-001, 628059-B21, 628180-001, 638516-002, MB3000EBKAB

It had HDS7230ALA AND H3U30006472S AND HUA723030ALA640 on its label, plus seemed to be a Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000.  It also had on its label HP 638516-002 and HP 397377-030

For use only as a data drive (not bootable due to BIOS limitations on the xw and ZX00 type of HP workstations) .  Drives over 2TB need GPT partitioning table, not a MBR partition table.