Solved 12TB Drive only showing up as 2TB

[MattWinter]

My 12 TB drive is only showing up as 2 TB in df -h. lsblk is showing correctly (irrelevant drive info removed):

$ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINTS
sdc           8:32   0  10.9T  0 disk
└─sdc1        8:33   0  10.9T  0 part  /mnt/backup

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1       2.0T  1.9T   50G  98% /mnt/backup

Have I missed a setting somewhere?

 

[z7vl7abxc]

does lsblk -f show FSAVAIL and FSUSE%? exactly 2T seems pretty specific. does the disk have an mbr or gpt partition table?

 

[wizardfromoz]

Matt, output of

sudo parted -l

may also provide insight.

Cheers

Wiz

 

[f33dm3bits]

I have to agree with @wizardfromoz What does the following show?

fdisk -l /dev/sdc

If I remember correctly the dos partition table supports max partition size of 2 Terabytes and the gpt partition table supports max partition size up to 18 Exabytes.

https://linuxconfig.org/mbr-dos-vs-gpt-partition-scheme-for-linux

Full Guide on GPT Max Size | What Is GPT Max Size?

This article provides a detailed guide on GPT max size and introduces a professional tool to help you convert MBR to GPT.

www.easeus.com

 

[MattWinter]

That's interesting. lsblk shows size as 10.9T (above), while lsblk -f shows FSAVAIL and FSUSE as if it were only the 2T. There is a 1.9T backup file on the drive now.

$ lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE            FSVER  LABEL UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINTS
sdc
└─sdc1      ext4              1.0          3e56ccb6-3cfb-4e85-a982-833a566f1006   49.1G    92% /mnt/backup


$ sudo parted -l
Model: ATA HGST HUH721212AL (scsi)
Disk /dev/sdc: 12.0TB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name              Flags
 1      1049kB  12.0TB  12.0TB  ext4         Linux filesystem


$ sudo fdisk -l /dev/sdc
Disk /dev/sdc: 10.91 TiB, 12000138625024 bytes, 23437770752 sectors
Disk model: HGST HUH721212AL
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 50B26D6E-7AB8-49E1-BC21-E2B335D6E0C3

Device     Start         End     Sectors  Size Type
/dev/sdc1   2048 23437768703 23437766656 10.9T Linux filesystem

 

[dos2unix]

sdc1 is only a partition on sdc. I usually wouldn't expect them to be the same size.

 

[z7vl7abxc]

can you check sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sdc1 and look at the free blocks? you should also be able to multiply block count by block size to get a total size of the partition. divide that by 1024 for kiB, by 1024 again for MiB, by 1024 again for GiB then by 1024 again for TiB. you should be able to do similar for free blocks to compare.

 

[atanere]

These tools use different measuring sticks. 12.0TB = 10.9 TiB (12000138625024 bytes shown by fdisk), and lsblk could be more clear about that on their report. You definitely have a 12TB drive, but it does seem that your 1.9T backup file has nearly filled up a 2TB partition on the drive.

Dell said (in 2021):

The default partition methods in Linux have a 2 Terabyte limitation.

This article (updated last month) also describes this problem and recommends gdisk or parted to create partitions >2TB.

2TB is a well-known hard limit in some cases. If you're using a 32-bit CPU, or 32-bit backup software, those might explain your trouble. Good luck!

 

[Deleted member 108694]

Yep - if your drive is MBR it only has a 2TB Limit, GPT (GUID Partition Table) does not have this limitation

 

[wizardfromoz]

Matt's /dev/sdc is shown by both

sudo parted -l

and

sudo fdisk -l

as being 12.0 TB and 10.91 TiB which are effectively the same.

Both methods also show the drive as being gpt, so mbr does not factor into it.

Wiz

 

[MattWinter]

sdc1 is only a partition on sdc. I usually wouldn't expect them to be the same size.

Yes, but my first post shows sdc1 as being 10.9T. Am I misinterpreting the output?

This article (updated last month) also describes this problem and recommends gdisk or parted to create partitions >2TB.

hmmm...I used parted. Maybe I didn't change a default somewhere. Let me go back and check...

I just tried the steps in atanere's article and that did it! I don't know why this works from within parted

(parted) mkpart primary 0TB 12TB

but this doesn't work from the command line

$parted -a opt /dev/sda mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%

...unless it was because I didn't manually delete the partition table first before trying to overwrite it with parted. I have about 5TB of backups on there now, so I don't really want to undo all that and continue running experiments. Maybe I'll revisit this if I get another large capacity drive. For now, I'm marking it resolved.

 

[atanere]

Glad you got it sorted out. I've never had a problem using Gparted on 4TB and 6TB drives that I have, so I never realized there was an issue with this before. It's good to know!