An interesting find?
 

Hi Guys,

I see the silence has been broken so i figure i would post this interesting find.

I'm not sure if it's ok to post links or not here? so i will just point you in the right direction.

I was browsing fleabay and spotted "Quantum Snap Server M4100 4x250GB 1TB Network Storage Device" being sold by "kpsurplus" in the USA

Yes you read that right - a Snap M4100 with 250GB drives fitted!!! :eek:

Most of you regulars will know, but for those who don't, it is beleived, rhumoured, even tested and proved that the M4100 is 128 bit LBA and therefore is limited to a maximum drive capacity of 137 GB.

Obviously just because the drives are fitted does not mean they are fully accessable. It is most likely to be that they can only be formatted to 137GB and someone hasn't realised this when they fitted them.

However, i thought it was interesting enough to bring it up, just incase anyone wanted to comment or maybe some genious out there has actually found a way around the limitation?

I actually own an old M4100 with it's original 4x 30GB drives in it. (i do have more modern GOS units aswell) I have some 120GB drives i will eventually put in it but Doh! my unit is a revision 001 PCB and will require me to make those resistor mods most likely. A project for a rainy and less busy day i guess.

Anyway, it would be interesting to hear any comments about that "for sale" item if you have any?

I don't plan on bidding/buying it, i'm not in the same country and shipping would be far too expensive.

Have a great day!

Re: An interesting find?
 

Beats me, anything is possible I guess... If I remember correctly, we determined the hardware is there, it was just the firmware that needed fixing.

Re: An interesting find?
 

Just because there installed does not mean it's using all of the HD capacity.

You can install any size HD you want but the SOS will restrict it to 130meg on the 4100's.

Re: An interesting find?
 

Yeah, i know.

I'm assuming the seller either doesn't know this or is deliberately trying to pass it off as having 1TB storage, which just isn't the case. Or atleast isn't useable space!

It would probably be more beneficial for someone to buy it for the drives, although i can't remember how much it was for sale for, so it might not be worth it, even for that.

Re: An interesting find?
 

Correct. When I had a sit-down meeting with the appropriate Snap technical people, they had the mistaken impression that the Promise chip in the 4100 didn't support LBA48 mode, and that's why they didn't add big drive support on the 4100 when the rest of the SnapOS models got it. I went back to them with the revised Promise datasheet and the Promise-supplied diffs to the reference driver.

However, by that time they were already well on the way to shipping the Guardian OS units, and their need for LBA48 support was mostly so they could ship competitive low-end units (single-drive models). They decided that there wasn't a business case for making the LBA48 changes on the 4100, as they really wanted to sell the newer Guardian units, not simply allow people to put bigger drives in older 4100's.

Re: An interesting find?
 

If I recall there was some early Promise chips that they used in the early production runs that had a bug. It was my understanding that the later runs were fine, and software driver/firmware could correct the problem. But since all this is in flash ram there was very little room to make the correction. Which was a shame since the 4100's were pretty nice units.

Anyway that bridge is burned down and is no longer a option. Even it it did the slow nic port would kill any performance.