Any one out there playing with Guardian OS

[webboy]

Ive got a pair of 4400 im playing with. Id like to know if anyone has any experience with the guardion OS. It would seem there is a drive size limitation with this os or raid card.

Does any one know the differences between OS revisions. the machines i have are at 2.6.50 and both machines will not use the entire disk space installed.

Server 1:
Server Type GuardianOS
Model 4400
OS Version 2.6.050
BIOS Version 3A01
Memory Size 503 MB
Platform Bytes 05.00.00
CPU Speed 996 MHz

Location Model Size
Drive 1 195 GB WDC-WD2000JB-00 169,770MB
Drive 2 195 GB WDC-WD2000JB-00 169,770MB
Drive 3 195 GB WDC-WD2000JB-00 169,770MB
Drive 4 195 GB WDC-WD2000JB-00 169,770MB

Server 2:
Server Type GuardianOS
Model 4400
OS Version 2.6.050
BIOS Version B26
Memory Size 503 MB
Platform Bytes 05.00.00
CPU Speed 1262 MHz

Location Model Size
Drive 1 199 GB Maxtor-6L200P0 154,476MB
Drive 2 199 GB Maxtor-6L200P0 154,476MB
Drive 3 199 GB Maxtor-6L200P0 154,476MB
Drive 4 199 GB Maxtor-6L200P0 154,476MB

Frustrated

[blue68f100]

It's using LBA48.

This (33 meg) is the RAID 5 overhead. It keeps parity data for drives on each side of it. It uses this data to rebuild the array incase there is a failure.

It can also be due to drive hardware, One my be using 3 platters where the other is 2. Which changes heads and cyl.

[webboy]

After a exausting week of trying different setups and OS versions heres the conclusion ive come to. It is possible to get larger than life disks in this bad boy.
As per Adaptec there is no hardware limitation in the 4400 and 4500's.

It would apear that the issue is the size of the 1st drive. My final atttempt to expand the drives to there fullest capacity failed again but this time the results were better.

I pulled the 1st drive from the origional server which has 200 gig drives formatted down to 169.7. I put it in the new server as drive 1 booted it up. Put the 1st drive from the new server in slot 2 it saw it as a 200 gig drive formated as 154 and reformatted it to match the first drive.

Powered down pulled the drive from the old server and put it back in it then moved drive 2 to drive 1 position booted up and started to feed the server drives. all formatted at 169.7 gigs.

At this point adaptec told me it would resync the drives to there proper size. THIS IS NOT THE CASE. it kept them at that size even after a system reset and upgrade of the OS.

Im wondering now if there is a way to telnet into the box via its serial port and expand the array from the command line. After all it is running linux.

Im tempted to call adaptec and buy a the largest replacement drive for a 4500 with the OS on it that they will sell and then buy matching drive to replace every drive in both servers.

[jontz]

Tell you what...you give me one of your 4400's and I'll play with it and let you know what I find :)