Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Hello folks,

I am trying to upgrade my 4000.
I have purchased 4 Seagate 400GB IDE ATA 100 drives.
Here are the specs on my server:

Model Software Hardware Server # BIOS
4000 series 4.0.860 (US) 2.0.1 300838 2.0.252

I put them all in and it sees and formats them fine at 379GB as individual disks, however when I try and do raid 5 I get an error. I am currently trying to mirror two of the drives just to see it it will, and it seems to be working....12 hours and am at 90%

I have a 256 stick in but it only reads as 128 (pc133). I have previosly had 4 160's in and could raid 5 those...

Any idea's???

Thanks

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Hmm

I think 128 is max ram i believe

If would help us immensely if you could post the error messages your getting putting it into raid5

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

After I go into disk configuration and select the drives and click ok....it starts, then kicks back red and says disk read error. Then the only thing I can do is to remove configuration...which reformats all 4 drives again as individual. Very time consuming troubleshooting....:mad: I would send a print screen, but right now it is busy mirroring. Also, this can handle 256 pc100. I took the one off my Promise SX4000 raid card and it saw it....now I need another stick :)

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Is this when you use all 4 disks for the RAID 5 or just 3, or 3 with a spare?

PLEASE keep us posted with all the details (or at least me) of how every bit of this goes. I have a 4000 and been trying to figure out what drives and sizes to put in mine as well. There is another thread here on the forum where we had a lengthy discussion about the power limits of the 4000. Someone tried 4 500GB Seagates and it would shut down during start-up due to power limits. You are near that limit, so I am VERY CURIOUS on how all of this goes. I been looking at WD 320 drives because of the power limit, but this makes me rethink all of that.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

I am not sure that power is the issue...I can format all 4 drives individually (about 40 minutes), and have just successfully mirrored a pair (took 13 hours). I have tried with 4 drives as well as 3 drives for the raid 5 – no dice thus far. I too had been eyeing the 320’s because of the price break/ power…but then saw the 400’s for sale on Fry’s for $110 ea. W/ 2DA shipping included. Insane price so I jumped on it. Not a total loss, since I have a raid card I can put these on if it comes to it. I just wanted them in the snap and had read that others were having success with larger drives. I am still pretty new at hacking and upgrading the snaps, but have gotten the bug… There has got to be a way to make this work…

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

In another post your said that it will see certain 256MB sticks. I would put one in and try it with 256. Extra RAM might help. I believe that these will only work with low density RAM, perhaps the 256 you tried was high density?

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

The last users with those big drives ended up setting up a 3 disk array with 1 hot spare.

If it not seeing all of the ram, it doens't like the ram layout, try another one. I went through that on my 2000.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

I am not saying this is your problem, just something to put in the back of your mind, but here is the thread where we talked about it.

http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/sho...t=13164&page=2

Pages 2 and 3 of that thread mostly...

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Grrr :mad: , what a waste! (unless of course you are running something where you need that much data security). If a person is going to do that, they might as well break it into 2 RAID 1 arrays, same amount of data space roughly and less XOR overhead.


It will be interesting to note if he makes the 400's work in the 4000 correctly. If he does, it will be the largest functioning upgrade I am aware of on the 4000.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

I wish I knew what was causing this error.

When the Array starts, It has to put parity data on adjacent drives. I'm wondering if the error is related to the parity bit. It is a large NUMBER, as the capacity and drives goes up, so does this number. So it could actual be a number too large for the old processor to handle.

I know the added ram helps all Snaps.

Any other thoughts:doh:

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Thanks for all the quick responses. Here is an update...
I added a second power supply and am now successfully formating 3 of the drives in a raid 5 partition. I am about 50% complete. Prior to this it would error out right at the start, so this is looking very promising! When complete I will try with all four and let you know.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Hmmm, so it seems it was power related. That would make sense, trying to build a large RAID 5 array would require the most power as it is the most processor and disk intensive. Did you plug the drives into the second power supply and just let the original do the mobo and fans?

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

I have 2 drives and processor fan on external power supply and 2 drives, MOB and exhaust fan on original power supply. Basically evenly distibuted (I think). I am just getting ready to start the 4 disk raid 5 build. My next test will be after the build completes (which will probably take until tomorrow night) - I plan to see if I can run it back on the original PS. If the power constraint is only when building the array that will be awesome. Like I said before, it has been running with these drives fine individually so far. It was just refusing to build the array. We shall see....

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

File System : mkfs failed!!! Error = 5
File System : Preposterous size -1963429888

Ok, folks....still cannot get 4 400's to go raid 5. These are the errors I recieve in the log file. I have even put all 4 drives on an external power supply, and run just the MOBO and fans on the original PS. Maybe the TB limit is a problem for the 4000?
I was able to get a raid 5 array with 3 400's, so that is pretty good...

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Preposterous size! I love the terminology, if not the result. I was going to say something about doing and OS upgrade, but you are already using OS 4.

I have seen several eBay auctions listing the 4000 in configurations up to 1 TB, which would be 4x250GB. Here is an example:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Snap-Server-4000...QQcmdZViewItem

Maybe they know something we don't...although you did have 3x400GB drives up and going for 1.2TB. Evidentally there is some upper limit in the snap os for raid configurations.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

The 1 TB makes more sence execpt with 3 x 400 = 1.2 TB - OH
250 have never been a problem. OK
300 have, ???? 4 x 300 - 1.2 TB the same as a disk 400.

It's has to be (number) that the snap can't process. It could actually be something in the Kernel of the Ancient FreeBSD that they are using.

But there were a couple that have put 2 x 500 in 2200, according to ebay. But they may have not tested it in raid. But it's under 1 TB.

Depending on which MFG Drives you bought. There is a utility (Hitachi) for setting drive size. Which would allow you to use your 400 gig drives at a lower capacity.

Or better yet, try to adjust the cluster size larger. So if it's using a 4k now, up to 8k (16,32), would cut the parity numbers to 1/2 ........ If I recall there is a cluster size in debug .........

What would happen if you tried a "RAID 0", is this an option for the 4000?

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

These are Seagates

Model: ST3400633A
Firmware Rev: 3.AAH

This is what I get with a 3 disk raid 5 setup:

File System : Formatting /dev/rraid0
File System : /dev/rraid0: 1554358272 sectors in 1517928 cylinders of 16 tracks, 64 sectors
File System : 758964MB in 94871 cyl groups (16 c/g, 8MB/g, 768 i/g)

Yes, on 4000's you can Stripe, Mirror and Raid 5. I have not tried a stripe yet, mostly due to the fact that I am more interested in Raid 5. Although, maybe I should try...would be interesting to see if it failed there too because of the "preposterous" size LOL. I have looked at the Seatools that came on the disk with the drives -anyone have any insight into how to make the changes described above? Do I have to put the drives in a pc and run the tool on them?

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

To use seatools it must be done in a PC.
It seams Hitachi tools has more options than Seagates. But most are only for SATA drives with cmd quing.

Man those are huge numbers, 1.5 billion sectors .... no wonder it's having problems.

Well if you ran 2 mirrors. You would have about the same capacity. Would be slower comparied to raid 5. But on a disk failure you can still read the data.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Well, I think I'm going to let it be at a 3 disk raid 5 setup. If someone were to buy 4 320's I think it would work (with 2 power supply's) because it would come in just under a TB. I still think that after the build completes you could go back to one PS, as soon as mine has completed the backup disk rebuild I will do that.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Didn't I already say that? :cool: Conisidering the speed over the network, I doubt the speed difference between RAID 1 and RAID 5 would be even noticed. Even if it was, Writes would be faster since these SNAPS use software RAID and RAID 5 can be very demaning on the minimal CPU/MEMORY being used in these SNAPs during a Write operation. To me, the real issue would be the loss in data capability (1/2 in RAID 1 versus 2/3 in RAID 5), which is also why RAID 5 with a hot spare makes no sense over RAID 1 in a RAID setup with less than 5 drives (like in an 8 or 12 drive setup).

As for this "numbers" problem, not only could it be the OS choking at a certain point, but the Firmware or even the software for the RAID 5 (software RAID remember).

I am not 100% sure where the next barrier is, but doing a little binary will lead one to think it is at least around 2.2 TB (4 bits more than the 137 GB barrier). 3 more bits would get us a 1.1 TB barrier, but that makes no sense on how things are done (usually goes in chunks of 4 or 8 bits, not 3). But when talking about an old version of BSD, the RAID software, or Adaptec, who knows for sure? If there is a barrier in that area at 3 more bits, it will be at 1,099,511,627,776 if that helps anyone. The next bit (4 bits) will allow 2,199,023,255,552 if anyone cares.

But I am a hardware guy, what do I know. This is a problem for those software guys.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Depends on how many platters that 320 has if it would need additional power or not. If I remember right from that power supply conversation, we decided 2 and 3 platters drives would work with the normal power supply, but 4 platter drives were too much power draw. I can't remember now for sure. How many platters do those Seagate 400's have? Speaking of which, I need to go look up the WD 320 GB for it's number of platters, thanks for reminding me.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Hitachi had low amp draw .... and the newer .10 (perp) drives if I recall.

How much capacity difference between raid 1 and a 3 disk Raid 5 ?????

You can always put the drives in a old PC and run FreeNAS in raid 5. The only problem is it's still beta, with limited support.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

RAID 1 = 1/2 capacity

RAID 5 = 2/3 capacity

i.e.

2 x 250 GB drives in RAID 1 (Mirrored) will give you 250 GB.

3 x 250 GB drives in either RAID 3 (2 drives stripped and 3rd drive as parity) or RAID 5 (3 drives stripped with 1/3 of each drive being used for parity) will give you 500 GB.

3 x 250 GB with 1 x 250 GB hot spare in RAID 5 (3 drives striped with 1/3 of each drive for parity and 1 drive as a spare) will give 500 GB.

4 x 250 GB drives in RAID 5 (4 drives striped with 1/3 of each drive used for parity) will give you approximately 670 to 700 GB.

With RAID 5, you actualy get a little more than 2/3, but that is a close approximation for a RAID 5 setup in most cases. Wrong?


As for FreeNAS and RAID 5, I would not trust it at all (yet). I was reading on their forum that they found a bug with it (more than a bug if you ask me). It works in RAID 5 okay, but when a drive fails and you replace that drive, the RAID 5 does not rebuild without crashing. Kinds of defeats the purpose of the RAID 5 if you ask me.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

The Seagates have 4 platters, but with the extra power supply no problem.

Mirror is 374,292

3 Disk Raid 5 is 748,586

True, I have downloaded FreeNAS...I just haven't messed with it yet.

Re: Help with 4000 upgrade
 

Well, it finally finished the 3 disk array. I shut it down and removed the 2nd PS and then turned it back on and all is well. So apparently it only needs the extra power when it is attempting to build the array. I have attached a screenshot (hope it works correctly).