Is there a limit on storage capacity for Sata III ?

[mellontes]

This is probably a stupid question, but I have not yet seen an answer to this question.

The reason I ask is this:

If I buy a motherboard with Sata III ports (and right now there are 8TB and 10TB Sata III drives available), will it be possible to access a 50TB Sata III HDD in the future? Or are there present storage maximums in place?

Will my Sata III port be able to access a 50TB SAS HDD in the future?

I am not talking about attained speeds. I realize Sata III drives running from a SAS port will only manage 6Gb/s...

Can a SAS HDD connect to a Sata III port? If it can, I realize that it would be reduced in speed to the 6Gb/s standard, or perhaps worse...

Thanks in advance to all who are willing to put up with my newbie stuff. I am trying to determine which type of ports I need on a motherboard for an 8-bay NAS...

[guru]

You can connect SATA devices (Hard drives) to a SAS controller (HBA) but NOT the other way around.

Good read >
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/2581408


BTW Super Micro Boards are rather good if you want decent embedded SAS support

[mellontes]

Thanks for clarifying one answer to my questions.

I REALLY need to know if there is a storage limit size for Sata III ports.

[fzabkar]

Any capacity limitation would be in the BIOS or the SATA driver. The ATA standard allows 48 bits for accessing drives in LBA mode, so the theoretical maximum capacity is ...

2^48 sectors x 512 bytes per sector = 131072 TiB = 128 PiB

[mellontes]

Okay. Thank you.

Just one last question to absolutely clarify my pitiful understanding.

If Seagate comes out next week with a 200TB Sata III drive, would I have any trouble in accessing all 200TBs (when connected to my Sata III port)?

[fzabkar]

I can't answer your question.

In the past there was a case where NVIDIA had a 31-bit LBA limitation in its drivers, thereby restricting the capacity to 1TiB. Other vendors had a 32-bit LBA limitation which restricted the capacity to 2TiB.

[mellontes]

No clue what you said.

Would 200TB be well within the 2TiB?

Can anyone help me?

[fzabkar]

TiB = tebibyte
TB = terabyte

200 terabytes = 182 tebibytes

http://www.google.com/search?q=200TB+in+TiB

[mellontes]

I am not talking about speed. I regret saying anything about in an attempt to express SOME knowledge.

If I purchase a motherboard with several Sata III ports, and attach an approved CPU, and install Windows 10...

and attach a 200TB Sata III drive to one of the Sata III ports in the future...

Will I have access to bulk the disk? (I say "bulk" because I do not want a response that talks about true formatted capacity or such)

I would have thought this to be a yes or no question, but it seems anything other than that.

[fzabkar]

Remember the Y2K bug? How was anyone to know if the author of a particular piece of software chose to use 4-digit years or 2-digit?

Similarly, how can anyone say whether the programmer who wrote your particular SATA driver or BIOS chose to use 48-bit LBAs or some arbitrary restriction? For example, who would have expected to encounter a 31-bit limitation?