Do SAN/DAS boxes support higher capacity drives?

[rkd29980]

Do all the SAN/DAS disk arrays support 6+ TB drives or do they only take the drive capacity listed on the trays which is usually less than 1TB?

Does anyone know if the Sun Storage J4400 arrays take 6TB or larger drives?

How fast are these arrays?

 

[Blue Fox]

Generally you aren't restricted to whatever the drive labels say, however firmware locking and using 520/528 byte sectors is often present, which will make it more difficult to use off-the-shelf drives. Given the age of the unit you mentioned, whether or not it supports 2TB+ drives could go either way. Should also mention that it's likely you'll need interposer boards to use SATA drives too.

I wouldn't buy one as there are far better solutions these days on the cheap if all you really need is a rackmount SAS expander shelf. Plenty of cheap Supermicro gear on eBay.

 

[VRT]

Generally you aren't restricted to whatever the drive labels say, however firmware locking and using 520/528 byte sectors is often present, which will make it more difficult to use off-the-shelf drives. Given the age of the unit you mentioned, whether or not it supports 2TB+ drives could go either way. Should also mention that it's likely you'll need interposer boards to use SATA drives too.

I wouldn't buy one as there are far better solutions these days on the cheap if all you really need is a rackmount SAS expander shelf. Plenty of cheap Supermicro gear on eBay.

This is exactly why we went to using FreeNAS on backblaze boxen. I we have quite a few of these deployed and they perform better, have cheaper better support, also more reliable as long as you aren't on the bleeding edge stuff. We are in process of going from 6-10tb drives and the number of drives is quite a few.