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Snap Server / NAS / Storage Technical Goodies The Home for Snap Server Hacking, Storage and NAS info. And NAS / Snap Classifides |
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08-19-2011, 10:52 AM | #1 |
Cooling Neophyte
Join Date: Jun 2005
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Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
I just built a server using an older Intel motherboard and SCSI-based server case. I modified the SCSI backplane so that I could still use the case's drive bays but with SATA drives instead. I blogged about it, here's the link:
http://vvenesect.wordpress.com/2011/...e-sata-drives/ Since it's been a little slow lately I thought this might stir some conversation. Enjoy! |
08-21-2011, 08:16 PM | #2 |
Thermophile
Join Date: May 2006
Location: Yakima, WA
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
I think some people around here might get offended at your comment about nobody here having "the Chops" to do the conversion on the 4100. Plenty of people here, or at least during that time frame, had/have the chops to do it.
I was a late-comer to that particular subject, but was involved in the late ends of the conversations about it. It was not about "the chops", but rather about being worth the tremendous effort that would have to go into it. Given the slow ethernet speed of the unit and limitatios of the OS, it just wasn't worth the hard work that would have to go into making it work with larger drives than it could already do given the Snap 4400, 14000, 4200, 4500 etc that were already available. As a side note, YOU WERE WRONG IN WHAT YOU SAID IN THAT BLOG. It was not about a driver in the SNAP OS, it was in the firmware/BIOS. That is not an easy mod and was just not worth doing.
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~ 6 x Snap 4400 (SATA Converted) 2 x Snap 4500 (SATA Converted) 1 x Snap 110 5 x Snap 410 3 x Snap 520 2 x Sanbloc S50 Drives from 250GB to 2TB (PATA, SATA, and SAS) GOS v5.2.067 All subject to change, day by day...... |
08-21-2011, 08:25 PM | #3 |
Thermophile
Join Date: May 2006
Location: Yakima, WA
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
While my last message was coming from a bit irritated point of view (slamming the great people that are/were on this forum), this message is a genuine question. I do not mean to question you personaly or piss anyone off, but I do have a question I have to ask to make this make sense to me and maybe others.
Why? Beyond just the fun of doing some hardware hacking? Why not a Guardian OS unit and an expansion like a Snap Disk 10 if you want more than 4 drives, or a Snap Disk 30 or S50 if you want more than 8 (or 12 if you use two Snap Disk 10s)? If you you have to have SATA, then doing the SATA mod is easy enough, or there is always the 410, 520, and the Snap Disk 30 and S50 are already SATA. These units can be purchased fairly inexpensive these days. Like I aid, I am NOT trying to offend you, I swear. Maybe I am just dense, but I somewhere missed the whole point of it all. The snaps I just mentioned would do everything you stated you wanted, except maybe to not use GOS. But, since GOS is by far the best file server OS going, it is hard to beat. I am just confused a little bit, please explain.
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~ 6 x Snap 4400 (SATA Converted) 2 x Snap 4500 (SATA Converted) 1 x Snap 110 5 x Snap 410 3 x Snap 520 2 x Sanbloc S50 Drives from 250GB to 2TB (PATA, SATA, and SAS) GOS v5.2.067 All subject to change, day by day...... |
08-23-2011, 04:05 PM | #4 | ||
Cooling Neophyte
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
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Point taken, thanks for the clarification. I'll go back and make an update/correction to the post. |
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08-23-2011, 04:17 PM | #5 | |
Cooling Neophyte
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
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THe last part is simply to show people what's possible if they take an old, "outdated" unit and perform some old-fashioned hacking work to extend its life. These things are showing up in surplus stores now, cheap, just because they use an outmoded storage technology. Why scrap them if you can still use them? No offense taken. For you such an undertaking might not be interesting, given your experience with the Snap platform already. Nothing wrong with that. But others who are starting out might find the project challenging on an intellectual and capabilities-level. I know I did. |
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08-23-2011, 06:10 PM | #6 | |
Thermophile
Join Date: May 2006
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
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With there being a limitation of 100baseT, much over the 512GB limit woud take forever and a day or two to back up. And then with a further limitation of not being able to go over 1TB ever due to the base OS being used for Snap OS, it just kind of made it a wash for most of the guys I had talked to who could have done it. It would have been damn hard and time consuming and just didn't seem worth it is all. If it had been easy, it probably would have gotten done just for fun, but... Again, not that one is right and the other wrong, just a different mindset by most of the people who probably could have done it is all.
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~ 6 x Snap 4400 (SATA Converted) 2 x Snap 4500 (SATA Converted) 1 x Snap 110 5 x Snap 410 3 x Snap 520 2 x Sanbloc S50 Drives from 250GB to 2TB (PATA, SATA, and SAS) GOS v5.2.067 All subject to change, day by day...... |
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08-23-2011, 06:15 PM | #7 | |||
Thermophile
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
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~ 6 x Snap 4400 (SATA Converted) 2 x Snap 4500 (SATA Converted) 1 x Snap 110 5 x Snap 410 3 x Snap 520 2 x Sanbloc S50 Drives from 250GB to 2TB (PATA, SATA, and SAS) GOS v5.2.067 All subject to change, day by day...... |
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08-23-2011, 06:17 PM | #8 | ||
Cooling Neophyte
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
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The reason that the 4100's didn't get LBA48 support at the same time as the rest of the legacy Snap product line was because the Snap engineering staff was under the impression that it was not possible to do it on the particular Promise controller which was (only) used in the 4100. I sent them a set of LBA48 diffs against the FreeBSD driver for the chip in question, and pointed them to the Linux driver, which also did LBA48. The only BIOS issue is that the operating system (on disk-based OS units like the 1100) needs to be within the first 127GB of the drive as the BIOS doesn't know about LBA48. On flash-based OS units like the 4100, this is irrelevant as the OS is in flash. What it eventually boiled down to was that there was no amount of money that could convince Snap to provide a feature whose sole purpose was to enable customers to avoid the need to purchase new Snap products. |
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08-23-2011, 06:22 PM | #9 | |
Cooling Neophyte
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
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08-23-2011, 06:26 PM | #10 |
Thermophile
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
Well, we must have talked to different Snap Engineers then, LOL (typical of them back then).
What I was able to get out of them was that the controller did in fact support LBA48 (after I proved it them, the asshats), but the BIOS would need upgraded (the actual firmware portion) and then a driver (which you mentioned) inserted into the Snap OS for the 4100 and LBA48. The driver would be an easy fix, but the hard firmware would not be. In fact, they told me some used ROMs instead of EPROMS, which could then accordingly not be updated without a chip change. I stopped pursuing it myself at that point, but do not know what if anything came after that.
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~ 6 x Snap 4400 (SATA Converted) 2 x Snap 4500 (SATA Converted) 1 x Snap 110 5 x Snap 410 3 x Snap 520 2 x Sanbloc S50 Drives from 250GB to 2TB (PATA, SATA, and SAS) GOS v5.2.067 All subject to change, day by day...... |
08-23-2011, 08:48 PM | #11 | ||
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
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I actually spent a couple days with their engineering staff in their office going over all of this, getting an estimate on the amount of time it would take, and so on, before management (theirs, not mine) decided they didn't want to pursue it for business reasons. |
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08-26-2011, 02:21 PM | #12 |
Cooling Neophyte
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
Thanks for the good information, Phoenix32 and Terry. That information was scatted through a number of posts and a couple of threads, and I thought I'd remembered things correctly. I've made a correction to the blog with appropriate credits; please check it and verify that I got it right.
At any rate, now I've got an otherwise good 4100 that I'm not sure what I'll do with...I could put one 1TB disk on my Linksys NSLU2, outstrip the 4100's capacity, and still end up with that music server I'd originally wanted. |
08-27-2011, 01:18 AM | #13 | ||
Cooling Neophyte
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
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I don't know that the piece in your update about the flash memory being near maximum capacity is correct. Most of the LBA48 stuff is already in the OS image the 4100 runs - the missing piece is the device driver changes, which are quite small. I doubt the image would brow by more than 256 bytes. Quote:
* Mostly - there is a glaring oversight in the 4100, as well as the other Snap models from that era - there is no parity protection in memory, so there is a chance of silent data corruption. - 6 RU, 2.8TB raw, 2.1TB usable, 50Mbyte/sec - 6 RU, 64TB raw, 48TB usable, 1000Mbyte/sec |
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08-27-2011, 08:06 AM | #14 |
Cooling Neophyte
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
Gaaaah! Fixed. Thanks, Terry!
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08-27-2011, 10:13 AM | #15 |
Cooling Neophyte
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
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08-29-2011, 09:30 AM | #16 |
Cooling Neophyte
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
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08-29-2011, 04:02 PM | #17 |
Uber Pro/Mods
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
I don't have much SNAP knowledge, but I greatly admire what you did to that backplane! The idea (exactly as you did it) has crossed my mind but I thought it would be a big unsucessful mess. I've dealt with my share of old P3/P4 servers and that is a GREAT way to save money and take advantage of what's infront of you. I mean, it's pretty "ghetto" on some levels but seems fine for a home server. I may have to pick up another bulky P3 box and try this out when I decide I need a home server again
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08-29-2011, 05:18 PM | #18 |
Thermophile
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
Ben, another option might be to take a Snap 4400 (they are very inexpensive) and do some modding on that (it is a P3 system requiring little power).
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~ 6 x Snap 4400 (SATA Converted) 2 x Snap 4500 (SATA Converted) 1 x Snap 110 5 x Snap 410 3 x Snap 520 2 x Sanbloc S50 Drives from 250GB to 2TB (PATA, SATA, and SAS) GOS v5.2.067 All subject to change, day by day...... |
08-30-2011, 09:58 AM | #19 | |
Cooling Neophyte
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
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09-25-2011, 09:12 AM | #20 |
Cooling Neophyte
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Re: Modify SCSI Backplane for SATA Drives
Well, this server might not last me too long. It seems that my NAS software of choice, openfiler, is going to 64-bit only on the next release. My server board, the Intel SE7501WV2, apparently will not do 64-bit as it's documentation claims it will. According to someone at Intel, NONE of their 533 FSB bus Xeons will do 64-bit; that apparently started with the 800 FSB units. So now I have a quandary. The original 9550 controller I purchased through eBay turned out to be defective. I had just ordered another one and gotten it installed when I found out about the 32/64 problem. I will be able to transplant the controller and drives to another (non PCI-X) system as a 32-bit controller and still have a 64-bit system with 32-bit disk access, or I would purchase another controller and re-do the array as 64-bit. The problem will be to offload all the data to temporary storage while I do it. Oh, well...
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backplane, convert, intel, sata, scsi |
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