Is Proxmox VE capable with Western Digital 3TB SATA hard drive?

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Is Proxmox VE capable with the Western Digital 3TB SATA hard drive?

Linux-based systems require Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware to run the new drives. Most new Linux systems are UEFI capable.

Thanks...
 
never tried, we have no such drive here to test - I assume you also do not have this drive as its brand-new?

but anyways, you should use a raid controller and if the hard drive can be attached to a raid controller than its is fine. but as far as I see this is a slow consumer hard drive, not suited for servers. or am I wrong?
 
Correct, we don't have the drive yet for testing. Soon I hope we can purchase the drive and test it, I'll update our findings here.

As for your comment on it being a slow consumer drive, you are correct. The drive is only a 5400RPM drive but they are working on a faster server version, no ETA.

Thanks...
 
thanks for the info, we are interested in getting it to work so please report if you have any issues.
 
The main issue will be grub support, since the Linux 2.6.3x series kernels are quite capable of dealing with UEFI. grub2 has UEFI support, legacy grub does not. grub2 is available in the upstream repositories (I know Ubuntu 10.10 at least does use it), but when I installed VE 1.6 on my test machine it installed legacy grub, so (???). Macs have been doing UEFI since the day they switched to Intel processors, so if Proxmox 1.6 will install on a Mac, it has the *technical* capability to do UEFI, it just needs your motherboard to use UEFI rather than BIOS.

Note that the UEFI vs. BIOS issue is different from the partition table format issue. The MBR partition table format cannot be used above 2.2TB, you'll need to use the UEFI-compatible GPT partition table format (like Apple uses on its Intel Macs). My guess is that Proxmox's installer is still hard-wired to MBR format.

You may end up having to install Ubuntu 10.10 and add the Proxmox repositories to your upstream and then use your apt front-end of choice to manually install it, unless Proxmox can verify that they can successfully install using UEFI-compatible grub and GPT partition table.
 
Oh yes, one more thing - even if you can't use the 3TB drive as your boot drive because BIOS and/or grub cannot boot off of a 3TB GPT-formatted drive, Linux should have no problem seeing it as a secondary data drive. So you could put a smaller drive for your boot drive and use the 3TB drive as your secondary data drive, Linux has no problem recognizing GPT partitions. You'll need to install GNU parted from upstream to partition the 3TB drive, though, because fdisk will not do it.
 
I didn't have a WD 3TB drive, but we have a Raid10 with 4TB consisting of 4x 2TB WD Caviar Blue. When I tried installing proxmox on the array installation just failed during creation of the LVM-volumes. I'm afraid you will face the same problem.

My solution was: install proxmox on a smaller drive (I used a 250GB-drive), start your system with a live-cd (e.g. ubuntu 10.10-server did a good job to me!) and partition your drive manually (create a small boot partition with ext3-fs and two partitions with lvm-fs each not larger than 2TB). Afterwards you have to create the lvm-structure. Create a volume group called some different way then proxmox does, original proxmox uses pve, so at first call it pve2 or something like that. Join the physical drives to the volume group. Afterwards create the logical volumes inside, proxmox uses a swap-volume (dev/pve2/swap) of the size of your RAM, a root-volume (/dev/pve2/root, 58GB on my system) and a data-volume (/dev/pve2/data the whole remaining drive-space). When your done activate the new volume-group und format each partition (ext3 for the small boot partition e.g. /dev/sda1, /dev/pve2/root and /dev/pve2/data, swap for /dev/pve2/swap). Next step is mounting the drives and rsyncing the data from each partition of the small installation-hdd to the corresponding partitions on the new large drive. Shut down your system and disconnect the small hdd. Start the system again with the live-cd and rename the volume-group from pve2 to original proxmox-pve. Mount the partitions under /mnt or /media the way it will be mounted in a working system (/dev/pve/root -> /, /dev/sda1 -> /boot), chroot into the structure and run grub-install. Afterwards reboot without live-cd and Proxmox should be starting!
 
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