SATA Adapter Review in 4200/4500

[blue68f100]

SATA Adapters Review.

Andy sorry for the delay in writing this. You where aware of the HD issues I had in getting the 4200 up to 8T (4x2T).

There is a slight mod that needs to be done to have clearance for the SATA adapters IDE cable from main board to adapters. Nothing major, just removing the plastic base that holds the din connector pins in alignment while the cards are made, and shorten the pins about 1/8". This gives clearance for the connector to clear. As you can see in the photo below it's a tight fit but is compact enough for the sleds to work.




I purchased several sets of the SATA converts for my 4500, 4200 and spare 4500. The 4200 has been upgraded to a 2.4 ghz P4 so it's now a 4500. The 4200 has 1.5gig of ram as well as one of my 4500. The remaining 4500 has 1 gig of ram with my WD RE drives. I bought 5 2T Seagage ST32000542AS 5900 rpm drives, 1 for a spare. Because these are were going into servers I needed to fully test the HD's. Besides these have a history of being bad right out of the box if you read the reviews. But at $70 each for a 2T drive the price was hard to beat. I used MHDD to perform the low-level format and verify of the drives. Any failing verify were deemed as being bad, the SMART technology should have detected the bad sections during the format and block those out. I used the SATA adapters for this process of formatting and verifying the HD's. I figured the continuous hammering of the 8.5hr to format + 6.5 hr to verify the drive would be a good initial test. I did a clean install of the GOS once a new HD was loaded. I then hot swapped the remaining 3 HD's in. All 4 HD were recognized and mounted for the GOS to use. I then started the long 24 hr raid 5 build. All went well till I started transferring data the next day. I had 2 HD dropout of the array as soon as the process started, drive 2 and 4 which are on the same controller. This took some time to trouble shoot, it's not often you have 2 HD's fail at the same time. It ended up being 2 HD's that were bad and had to be RMA for replacements. The 2 replacement HD's came in and went through the long process of formatting and verifying the HD surface again using the SATA adapters. The 2 replacement tested good. So I was back to setting the 4200 back up. Started to mount the HD's and 2 were not recognized and failed instantly, different slots. It happen to be 2 HD's from the original 5 order. Furthering testing of the HD's indicated that indeed they had failed. So I had to RMA those HD's. This made 4 out of 5 HD's received on my original order were bad, talking about bad luck. I had 3 working HD now, so while I waited for the replacements I decide to build a 3 disk RAID 5 array. This 3 disk array formatted and RAID 5 array built without any issue. I then started doing data migration from my other servers, data dump taking up to 20 hr including verify. My other servers use the 7200 rpm HD's and could not keep up with the Seagate 5900rpm SATA HD's. All data migration was done through my Dlink DGS-1216T GigE Switch. Transfer speed averaged around 20-24Mb/s between serves. 2 week later I received the 2 replacement HD's and one of those where physically damaged. It looked like a HD had been dropped on another HD, denting the top case cover preventing the heads from moving. So I had to call CS again and tell them that they sent me a DOA drive that was physically damaged and should have never been sent. They paid for shipping this time. But now I had enough HD to build a 4 disk array. So after testing the newly arrived HD I was set to build my array for use. All HD's were wiped clean again, new install of the GOS was used. Hot swapped all HD's once the GOS was running on the new 2T drives. Did data migrating from my other servers with no problems. The server with SATA HD's indicated to be faster than the IDE HD's. I wiped the disk array several times during my testing and in all cases NO problems what so ever showed up. The server has now been up for just over 1 month now, without any issues.

Conclusion: These SATA adapters are rock solid. Having continuously hammer these for days at a time I have 100% confidence that these are a very good option to expand your capacity without replacing your servers to the newer models.

[Stupid]

Add me to list of "believers".

I upgraded my SNAP 4500 server a few months back, using these same adapters. I've been meaning to post something here, but it kept slipping my mind. sorry about that. Here are my comments:

I saw someplace that the tray mod was "so simple a child could do it". I don't know what kind of kids you are hanging out with, but this was definitely not something I would trust the average seven-year old with. Having said that, I wouldn't say it was -difficult- (it wasn't) just that it was more than I would trust the average technician with. I know several people who have a degree in Computer Science that have difficulty plugging in expansion cards into their computers without assistance. Anyone who has enough thought to find this forum is almost guaranteed to be able to do it without any assistance. I went really slow for the first one; it took about 45 minutes to mod the first tray. Once I knew the procedure it was easy to do the remaining trays in less than ten minutes each. The hardest part was the power connector; bending the wires back on themselves and fitting the "cap" on back of the molex plug required quite a bit of force to accomplish. I had to use a small pair of channel-lock pliers to press it back on. Definitely more force than one could generate with one hand.

The tolerances to get these inside the SNAP 4500 case is REALLY tight. I had no idea how close they were before this. After the mod, tray #1 is no longer "hot swappable". The little plastic support for the cover sticks down just far enough to stop the power molex from sliding past. You can actually see this in the photo in the post above this. In my server, the molex plug -just- hits the black plastic piece that is directly above it in the photo. I had to remove the case cover and put just a tiny bit of pressure on the support (it only needed to move about 1/2mm!) to move it out of the way and insert that tray. It's such a small amount that it springs right back into place as soon as I release the pressure. The end result is that I will need to remove the cover whenever tray #1 needs to be removed or replaced. I could probably trim the plastic bit in the case to make tray #1 fit better, but it isn't that big of a deal. My SNAP lives on a shelf in my (dry and air-conditioned) garage, not in a server rack; I can easily remove the top cover if needed. This may be unique to my SNAP unit.

I did make one "goof" during the installation process, but it was not a fatal one. I mistakenly hot-swapped one SATA drive in to the SNAP while the old array was still running in degraded 3-disk mode. The SNAP tried to add that drive to the array and rebuild it. Of course, that ended with the SATA drive being formatted to only 250GB (instead of 1TB). My point is that, these adapters ended up being so robust that they were able to deal with an actual hot-swap. I'm almost certain that the designers didn't intend for the adapter to be used under those conditions, but they DO work.

After I discovered this error, I powered down the SNAP, pulled all four drives, then inserted one SATA drive in bay 2 and my "spare" 80GB drive in Bay 1. (I keep a spare 80GB drive formatted with GOS5.0.144... just in case.) About 4 minutes later I had a 1TB SATA drive with GOS ready to go. 30 minutes a after that, the SNAP 4500 was running with four 1TB SATA drives.

It took about 12.5 hours for the RAID5 to format and rebuild. The total size is 2.73TB, a bit less than four times as much space as I had before this procedure. It took another 16 hours for all of my data to copy back from the 2T portable drive I "borrowed" from Best Buy.

I used consumer-grade Seagate SATA drives. I know they are not super reliable, but the original drives in the SNAP were Maxtors and I know that the Seagates will be a step up from those! I was able to sell the original Maxtor 250GB drives on eBay for enough to pay for the adapter purchase, making this a very economical upgrade!!

I had been toying with the idea of buying a used 14000 or 15000 from eBay and filling it with 250GB drives for additional storage, but this allowed me to get much more space at a much lower cost. I'm still thinking of that 15000, but after this mod, I'm sitting at 17% usage and will probably not have to worry about space concerns for at least five more years.

I fervently endorse these adapters for use in any modern SNAP drive. It was worth every penny!!

[Phoenix32]

An interesting point has been made here. It appears there were two (or more) variations of the actual chassis. All of my units hot swap with no probems, but one other person had the same problem as you mention above. After looking closer at things (from some photos sent to me), it does appear some of the chassis do have tighter clearances than some of the others. The 4400's are all like this. The cure is as you suggested, to trim the plastic piece.