Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

Ehr.. ok i need a coffee... I'll reread twice before posting from now on :uhh:

Adi

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

Yes, both of those ideas work perfectly. The problem is getting 4x 400+ drives into a raid 5 configuration. My 4000 will format all 4 drives and run happily on the original power supply. I just can't seem to get it to go for all 4 drives. I upped the Raid Cache and that did not help. I tell it to do a raid 5 with all drives...it reboots and says format failed. Must tweak some more...

Radio, did you do something special to get your 4x320's to work? Change some debug setting? I really ant to get all 4 of these baby's online!

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

I was thinking that or, something for other similar SFF PSU, or even a large Mini ITX PSU

The PSU could hold it fairly well, i suppose, leaving one or 2 drives on the inbuilt PSU, and you could certainly manage!

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

And. It would be a fairly simple wiring job to get them to both run in parallel. i THINK that Joe wired up a few ATX PSU's like that a few years back.

Shane

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

Cianwill, He is using the new 7200.10 drives from seagate. These have 1 less platter - all the related heads, cyl....

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

less platters = less power consumption.

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

As far as ram on a 4000 is concerned, does it have to be unbuffered, ECC registered, or anything special or will normal PC-133 stuff work because i think I have a few 512's sitting around.

Shane

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

Mine has standard SDRAM in it (unbuffered non ECC)...

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

Yeah, they aint gonna put buffered ECC in it, cause it costs loads more

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

That's what i was thinking and hoping.

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

Im pretty sure most people like yourself have just had sticks laying around that they've used

And how many people would have EEC buffered laying around?

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

Hehe I have at least one friend that does. :p

But, I did find a 128mb stick that works fine. My 512mb wouldnt :( But since the server only had 64mb in it i consider the upgrade a success none the less.

Shane

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

Wasn't tehre other people reporting similar problems


Think 256 sticks work fine

My LaCie Ethernet Disk due to the board its built on, will only take a max of a 256mb stick in each slot


Ok, 1 friend. How many friends do you have?


Probably quite a small ratio :P

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

I guess a 750gb Seagate 16mb cache hard drive would be too large for the 4000 to handle. That would be great to make a 3TB server RAID 5.

Curious,

SM

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

It might be interesting to try in JBOD mode.

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

You could run 2 RAID 1 and stay under the 1T OS restriction/Wall.

The newer 7200.10 drives have a lower power consumption than older models. I think the original 30gig Quanium use more power than the 300gigs today.

The 512 meg sticks of PC100/133 are High density, which does not work in the Snaps. Has something to do with paging sizing.

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

I will try to setup two 750gb seagate's 16mb cache drives. I will try to get my hands on two 750gb and try them for RAID 5.

I will post my findings.


SM

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

You will be wasting your time in RAID 5 with the 750 gig drives. Any think over 1T has Major Problems. This has been beaten to death multiple times. You can run 4 250gig in raid 5 (max). Or most anything in JBOD, or 2 x RAID 1's. Raid 0 has the same restrictions of RAID 5.

Re: SNAP 4000 Limits ???
 

Nope, nothing special. Just upped the memory. Everythihng was going smoothly, but I am starting to notics the drive slow down when I get about 400-500 Gigs on it. I don't know if it's the space used or what. I recently moved a directory with music in it - about 300GB - to a different directory. The operation took less than a minute - just moving pointers - but now it seems really slow.:bawling: Fixed by upgrading the network - not the snaps fault!

I am looking for similar stories here, but havn't fund much yet. I also want to play with the debug parameters, but I am afraid I'll break something, so without good suggestions, I'm lost.

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

I'm Back.

The 4 320Gb drives in my 4000 work fine, with one exception. Unfortuantely for my usage this little glitch is unacceptable. I took a snapshot of the network usage durring a backup of the snap (so I can reconfigure it.) Notice those regular downward spikes? Here they are every 140 seconds, at the radio station they were every 30 seconds - or is my memory going?

http://whysradio.org/snap-backup.jpg

This is on my home network. The same thing happend at the radio station (but every 30 seconds - or is my memory going?) When playing music from the snap, even with very little useage ~32K/second, there would be these dropouts, and the audio would stop for .5-2 seconds.

The strange thing is that it's so regular. Exactly every N seconds. I'm looking for anyone else that can confirm or deny this. All you need is a transfer of two minutes to notice the pattern in a network monitor like taskmanager or analogx netstat live.

Once the backup is done, I'm going to mirror the to sets of drives.

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

What is your CPU doing at these times?

And what other programs are running?

How much ram does the 4000 have?

Which OS Version?

And do you have JVM active?

I have done 2-3+ gig of ftp transfer and have not got those kickups. And that's streaming at 4.5MB/sec.

Phoenix32 is the 4000 specialist, see what he has to say.

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

Go here and look at the Netstat Live screenshots

http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/sho...t=13731&page=2

Yes, I have seen these spikes, but not anywhere near as glaring as yours are (I suspect the 320 GB drives for that). These spikes appear to be as the cache loads/unloads. If you watch the disk activity, you will see this.

Further, the spikes are almost non existant (very very small and short) when sending with FTP. Add in that it is more pronounced when receiving FTP or when using SMB and this is an indication these cache loads are being caused by CPU load (the CPU cannot keep up with the cache when under higher loading).

Reducing the cache size seems to minimize this effect and part of why I recommend to people to use 128 MB memory unless they are running JVM enough to warrant 256 MB memory.

Now with all that said, I have not seen spikes anywhere near as glaring as yours were. Again, I have to suspect the 320 GB drives as part of that equation. We recently dug up information indicating the OS does have a practical limit of 1 TB (by we, I mean David). As we have said many times, the 4 x 300/320 GB drives just do not look like a good idea in a SNAP 4000. It might "apprear" to be working properly, but in the end may cause some serious grief.

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

I should mention that I maped the snap raid 5 to a windows drive. I have not tested FTP.

The graphs pictures when transfering from the snap.
No significant activity on the computer durring these snapshots.
Snap has the latest OS.
256mb RAM
No JVM

I did see those spikes on your earlier post, but never really thought about them. I suppose they are the same. It's hard to tell, but they do look regular. I assume you expect this problem to stay once I mirror the drives? - or maybe not if the cache is used more in the raid computations.

Can I set the cache size with debug? Perhpas do some more testing before I toast it. I needed more ram to build the array. FYI.

The CPU load idea does not make sense to me because this happens durring very minor transfers (23k/sec)

oidar

PS. Please see the new thread - What if the snap dies?

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

There are some settings for cache and page size. Use the ? from debug to get a list of debug commands.

With transfers running 4.8MB/sec the hickups are minor. I will have to load my 4100 backup with HD's and I will beable to run some test. I'm waiting for some slides to come in, so I only have to handle the unit once. SHould be here this week.

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

I did test with RAID 0, Mirror, and Single Drive operation, but I honestly can't remember for sure what the effects were. -IF- I remember correctly, the mirror and single drive operation had no real data spikes that I remember.


Yes, there are some cahce settings in debug, but I don't think they stick if the unit is turned off. I could be wrong, let us know...


I don't see the spikes at all in small transfers. Even during large transfers, these spikes are less pronounced than you are showing. The spikes I have seen (on multiple SNAP 4000 units) have been very quick, meaning they only dropped the average transfer speed by at most 0.2 MB/sec. They were very momentary and not a real problem.

I have streamed music from my SNAP 4000 units (I like to listen to my music on my notebook in another room while I am working). Not once have I heard even a single glitch, even when streaming 320 BPS files.

Once again, I have to attribute this to either the 256 MB memory, the 320 GB drives, or the combination of both. CPU load does have an effect on a RAID arrarys using that CPU for XOR operations. That same CPU is what has to drive the data transfers to and from memory (or cache), as well as to and from the NIC.

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

Well this above all gives me hope. I would have tested the cache settings, but I'm on a tight schedule and I like to have the computer working while I'm sleeping, so reconfigures and started the restore last night. It's 1pm now, and in 5 more hours I'll be able to start the second half of the restore. The data should be back before Monday morning.

I guess I can do a few tests before starting the second restore. I'll let you guys know what I find on the mirror.

Thanks!

oidar

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

I wonder if he is have a network problem. Try a direct connect with a crossover cable. That will give you a clean test. Then start adding your nework gear.

Do you have the snap acting as a Master Browser? Under Networks/microsoft Advanced settings, like below.

Advanced Microsoft Networking
Enable Master Browser
Enable Opportunistic Locking
Enable NT SMBs

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

I will test with a crossover cable if I can find one.

no, no, no, and no.

I did play with these a while back and it did not seem to make much difference.


I also have Enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP set, not TCP/IP and NetBEUI

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

I remember seeing in either the admin guide or the faq section on snapappliance.com that you should never disable opportunistic locking, or nt smb's unless advised to do so by Snap support as they sometimes caused problems.

Re: SNAP 4000 Errors and Limits
 

01/16/2007 23:03:21 Command: debug memory

Total System Physical Memory: 268435456
File System Memory Allocated: 179972592
Memory To be Written: 4210812
Memory On Loan: 0


Ok, on those dropouts, (see previous graph) I can reproduce them. It happens when opening a program that scans a large number of MP3s to make sure they match the database. I don't know if any of them are opened. when the program stops, everything returns to normal. I do see network dips at regular intervals, but never like this (zero net traffic, often for more than a second.) Even huge file transfers will not cause the problem, but this (necessary) program does.

What I learned by studying the debug screens is that the "memory to be written" above increases until just about the time of the traffic blackout, and is then zeroed out and begins increasing again. During large transfers, this changes a little, but usually it stays under 50K, during my problem it grows to over 4500K! The eventual write must be causing the snap to stall.

I guess I'll try going back to 128M RAM to see if will clean itself up faster.