2TB partition limit – Fact or Fiction?

[bumpy7]

bumpy7

9. November 2016 at 1:56 #23781

Hi all – I just plugged a 4TB WD „My Passport“ drive into my RPi3b running Max2Play 2.37 and seem to have successfully created a 4TB mount point and samba share for it via the Filesystem Mount page. I can see the data on the drive via the samba share and am copying some test data to it now.

But… There’s this ominous warning on the page that states: „Important: the maximum partition size is 2TB. If using larger disks you need to divide the disk space into partitions smaller than 2TB.“ So my question is: Or what? What horrible thing will befall me or my data? The drive came formatted with a single GPT/NTFS partiton with 4096 byte cluster size and seems to have mounted fine. Is the stated 2TB limit obsolete?

Here’s the output from parted -l:
Model: WD My Passport 259D (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdb: 4001GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 4001GB 4001GB ntfs My Passport msftdata

Thanks for any additional info!!

UPDATE: I now have about 1.5TB of audio files on the 4TB partition and all appears to be working fine so far. (I copied them onto the drive with it plugged into the USB3 port of a Win10 box, not over the RPi3’s Samba share. That would have taken about 4 days.) LMS took about 3 hours to build its database but appears to have been successful. Is this whole thing going to self destruct when I exceed 2TB or does the M2P statement of a 2TB limit not consider the current technology „Advanced Format“ drives?

[sfraser131]

sfraser131

8. Dezember 2016 at 18:09 #24703

I have found that I cannot create a NTFS partition any greater than approx. 2T from within the max2play environment. However, if I create the 4T (3.6 T actually) NTFS partition’s from within a Windows 7 environment (2 Bay external USB3 unit configured with 2x4T drives) and then relocate back on the Pi everything is recognised accordingly and seems to work fine. I am using one drive as an LMS music storage and the other as a DLNA video storage. One benefit of this approach is when migrating hundreds of Gigs of content over, I can bring the max2play offline and relocate the external USB drive’s back onto my windows 7 machine and enjoy the high USB3 transfer rate. While the Pi’s 100mbps Ethernet/USB chipset is fine for streaming, it is a bit of a bottle neck when initially moving content over.

M2P engineers, please chime in if above approach is not supported.

Cheers,

[bumpy7]

bumpy7

11. Dezember 2016 at 19:43 #24743

Thanks for the reply. That’s effectively what I did as well, since the 4tb ntfs partition already existed on the drive when I mounted it in M2P. I didn’t create the partition with M2P.

Seems to be working fine, although I’m having an issue where one of the pi3 cores goes to 100% and streaming stops if I attempt to browse my library by Song, Artist or Album instead of Music Folders (using Android app Squeezer). The other 3 cores appear to be sitting idle, so it seems that either M2P or LMS isn’t taking advantage of the pi3’s quad-core processor. Suggestions to resolve this issue would be welcomed, since having streaming stop for any reason is not tolerable.

[Christoph premium]

Christoph premium

13. Dezember 2016 at 18:50 #24850

Dear bumby7,

Sorry for the late reply.

„Is this whole thing going to self destruct when I exceed 2TB or does the M2P statement of a 2TB limit not consider the current technology “Advanced Format” drives?“

No, that will not happen. It may now be possible to mount more than 2TB with the Raspberry Pi and Raspbian. But we haven’t a 4TB hard drive to test it.

„Seems to be working fine, although I’m having an issue where one of the pi3 cores goes to 100% and streaming stops if I attempt to browse my library by Song, Artist or Album instead of Music Folders (using Android app Squeezer). The other 3 cores appear to be sitting idle, so it seems that either M2P or LMS isn’t taking advantage of the pi3’s quad-core processor. Suggestions to resolve this issue would be welcomed, since having streaming stop for any reason is not tolerable.

This could be a problem with too low energy. If you use a external usb hard drive, you will need a extra power supply to let it work correctly. Additionally I recommend you to activate the Max2Play function „Max USB current“. This setting you can find in the Raspberry Settings of the Max2Play webinterface.

Best Regard
Christoph

[bumpy7]

bumpy7

21. Dezember 2016 at 16:58 #25115

Hi Christoph, thanks for the reply. I may try switching to an externally powered drive, but it was my understanding that the pi3 had enough power on the USB ports to handle a portable drive that doesn’t have external power. I’ve also read that the max_usb_current=1 setting has no effect on the pi3, as it already provides 1.2A by default. (https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/4b2enb/psa_raspberry_pi_3_provides_12a_usb_current_by/)

You don’t think it’s just because there’s nearly 100,000 tracks in my library?

[bumpy7]

bumpy7

27. Dezember 2016 at 20:35 #25272

Well, I tried an externally powered drive and the problem remains. It’s a 2tb drive, so the 4tb partition on the earlier drive is also not the cause of the problem.

Here’s what top shows when I attempt to scroll through my library by song title (or artist or album) using android app Squeezer. After a few seconds of this, music playback stops until the app and server manage to display the next screenfull of song titles. Notice that PID 457 (squeezeboxserver) is at 100% CPU while the total pi3 cpu usage is only at about 25%. That makes it seem that the SB server is only utilizing a single core of the four, when instead it should probably have its streaming service on a dedicated thread/core to prevent such things as this from causing streaming to stop. (?)

top – 12:17:57 up 28 min, 1 user, load average: 0.51, 0.94, 0.92
Tasks: 160 total, 2 running, 158 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 24.8 us, 0.2 sy, 0.0 ni, 74.9 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem: 882788 total, 481288 used, 401500 free, 1632 buffers
KiB Swap: 102396 total, 72 used, 102324 free. 258004 cached Mem

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
457 squeeze+ 20 0 124452 114440 4120 R 100.0 13.0 2:16.04 squeezeboxserve
3426 pi 20 0 6808 1148 732 R 0.7 0.1 0:03.66 top
788 shellin+ 20 0 5904 2096 1184 S 0.3 0.2 0:00.83 shellinaboxd

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by bumpy7.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by bumpy7.