While I was searching for snap upgrades.... I found this:

[lordboots]

Buffalo Terrastations. They're 1TB of NAS with all the raid stuff, but have USB as well for hooking up external drives to, etc. It looks like almost as good of a deal as upgrading a Snap! server or better, depending on how big you want to go...

Dave

[killernoodle]

Looks nice, but for $1000 you can get 4 250gb drives and build a cheap file server with a via ITX motherboard..

[Davesworld]

I like the 1u rackmount best. For less money, the Dell 725n can be had for under a grand and you can put any nas os on it you want. It is similar to if not the same as a Snap 4400 which can easily go to 1.6TB. The Dell 745n is a bit faster plus sata raid. Once you get above the snap 4100 class, you can temporarily use a keyboard mouse and monitor. If the 4100 had at least a null modem port, you could really get into it as well but there is a connector inside that we don't know what it does. I am about to test a seagate 160GB drive on a 4100 and see where I can get. I upgraded to OS4 earlier which supposedly updated the bios for the promise controllers. I have since updated to more recent versions of os4 and will use the reinit nocore argument after booting up and see if I can get over 137.

[Davesworld]

Nope, I failed getting lba48 on the 4100. They must have anticipated the bigger and better hardware coming after the 4000 so they limited the 4100 to ensure sales of the bigger units is what I'd guess. Oh well!

[lordboots]

the 4100 to ensure sales of the bigger units is what I'd guess. Oh well![/QUOTE]

So, basically, the 4100's are pretty much locked down to 137GB, eh?

I did the math on it, and the 705's (4100) are about $360 delivered, then for another $400, you can get 250GB drives, but you can't use them in the snap servers, so you're stuck with about 550GB max on the 4100's then right?

I decided to give the Buffalo 1TB server a try, since it's got 4 USB ports on it and it's gigabit, I should be able to expand that out pretty easily and it was only $925 delivered for a 1TB. I'll config it for Raid 5 (unless I hook up my portable drives to the USB as backups, which isn't a bad idea).


Dave

[Terry Kennedy]

Nope, I failed getting lba48 on the 4100. They must have anticipated the bigger and better hardware coming after the 4000 so they limited the 4100 to ensure sales of the bigger units is what I'd guess. Oh well!Nope - at the time, the 4100 was the "bigger and better" unit. Unlike all of the other SnapOS-based units, it uses multiple masters for its 4 drives (2 Promise controllers). All of the other SnapOS units use the chipset drive controllers.

Snap didn't want to do LBA48 on any of the SnapOS stuff, but the 1100/2200 wouldn't be marketable as 120GB units. So they were forced to add LBA48 so they could sell a 250GB unit.

There was no "evil intent" to specifically not support LBA48 on the 4100 - it is just that they added support in the Intel chipset driver and didn't do it for the Promise chipset used exclusively in the 4100. It didn't help that Promise told them that the chipset didn't support LBA48 (not true, as FreeBSD, Linux, etc. support LBA48 on it).

It sat there as a dead issue until I asked them to quote me a price to add it. At that point, they decided they didn't have the engineering resources to allocate to it, as all of the work was being done on GuardianOS.

So I sold all my 4100's and started building my own servers (info here (http://www.tmk.com/raidzilla)). But I still don't think there's an evil conspiracy to keep LBA48 off the 4100's.

[Harbinger]

Nope - at the time, the 4100 was There was no "evil intent" to specifically not support LBA48 on the 4100 - it is just that they added support in the Intel chipset driver and didn't do it for the Promise chipset used exclusively in the 4100. It didn't help that Promise told them that the chipset didn't support LBA48 (not true, as FreeBSD, Linux, etc. support LBA48 on it).

So, if someone could disassemble the OS and add the appropriate driver... :D

[Davesworld]

Thanks for clearing that up Terry! I'm glad we got to hear about your dialogue with them. I'm afraid the people resources is a far more common issue than I realized and not just at Snap. I take it that the 4000 is totally different as far as chipsets?

Now off I go to see RAIDzilla!

[predator2005]

the 4100 to ensure sales of the bigger units is what I'd guess. Oh well!

So, basically, the 4100's are pretty much locked down to 137GB, eh?

I did the math on it, and the 705's (4100) are about $360 delivered, then for another $400, you can get 250GB drives, but you can't use them in the snap servers, so you're stuck with about 550GB max on the 4100's then right?

I decided to give the Buffalo 1TB server a try, since it's got 4 USB ports on it and it's gigabit, I should be able to expand that out pretty easily and it was only $925 delivered for a 1TB. I'll config it for Raid 5 (unless I hook up my portable drives to the USB as backups, which isn't a bad idea).


Dave[/QUOTE]

I just purchased a 4100 from Ebay, I was planning to put 4-250gb drives in it. What is the max drive size for this model?