Very Large Hard Drive
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Work in progressThis page is a work-in-progress describing the process necessary to install a very large hard drive into a Humax HDR Fox T2. |
With the release of Custom Firmware 3.10 it is now possible to fit a Humax HDR Fox T2 with a hard drive having more than 2^32 sectors. In practice this means that drives over 2TB in size can now be used.
Drives known to work
The following very large drives have been tested and are known to work:
| Vendor | Model | Size | Physical Sector Size | Logical Sector Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seagate | ST4000VM000 | 4TB | 4096 | 512 | Video 3.5 HDD SATA |
Pre-requisites
Using a very large drive requires Custom Firmware 3.10 or above. The stock Humax firmware cannot read these drives at all (it will see them but consider them to have a zero size).
Partitions tables
With these large drives, it is necessary to use a partitioning scheme called GUID Partition Table (GPT). When using a GPT, a legacy MBR containing a partition table is also created on the drive. This MBR generally contains a single partition of type EFI GPT (code 0xee) encompassing the entire drive, well as much of the drive as can be represented in an MBR partition - 2^32 sectors. This is known as a protective MBR since its main purposes is to prevent non-GPT-aware systems and tools from viewing the drive as empty or available. In the case of the Humax, it is necessary to create three partitions on the drive so that the Humax software sees these and considers the drive to be properly formatted.
Creating the GPT
Once the large disk is installed...
Formatting the file-systems
humax# mkfs.ext3 -m 0 -O sparse_super /dev/sda1 humax# mkfs.ext3 -m 0 -O sparse_super -T largefile /dev/sda2 humax# mkfs.ext3 -m 0 -O sparse_super /dev/sda3
