Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

Now, before David jumps on me with his RED TYPE OF DEATH, I know that the 4100 does not support drives > 137 GB. However, I can get Seagate 160 GB drives for the same price as the 120's. I am assuming that if I get the 160 GB drives that the 4100 will format and run them as 137 GB, thus giving me an extra 17 GB per drive which would be nice. My question is will there be any ill effect on perrformance or data corruption issues by using the 160 GB drives? Thanks all!

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

Larger drives should not cause any problems. Makes good since, to me.
Have you upgraded the factory ram. 128+ meg is good, unless you are using JVM.

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

Haven't upgraded the RAM yet, but I intend to. Seems like I need some low profile RAM for this bad boy, time to hit pricewatch.com and find a deal...too bad really, because I have a ton of PC100 and PC133 laying around but it is standard height.

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

That is rather clever actually!

The 160's would probably only be ~150 after overheads and block sizes and such

You could get exactly 137, or 137 - the normal over hears

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

I finally got the beast up and going...

I happened to have a WD 160GB drive laying around so I threw it in. It formated and loaded the OS no problem. The result: 128GB after format. I was figuring about 110-112GB useable after formatting a 120GB drive, so I did get my extra 17GB I was looking for, however I didn't get the full 137. Perhaps there is a formatting trick that will allow me to do this as re3dyb0y suggested, however I doubt it because if the snap only sees the first 137GB, it can't format any more than that, so the result is always going to be 128-130GB usable. Again though, I got my extra 17GB and the WD 160's are only $3 more a drive than the 120's.

Just wanted to give an update. I am one VERY happy camper right now :D

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

The other space is std overhead for file structure. You got all there is. Now you just need 2 more drives, so you can build a raid 5 array. Well at least 1 for the array and 1 spare.

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

Dumb question: I have built raid 5 arrays on computers before, but never on a snap server. I have moved some data over to the single drive currently in the snap server. Once I add drives and build my array, I am assuming that it will just take the data and stripe it onto my other drives. Is this correct, or by building an array from scratch am I going to blow away everything on the single drive? Thanks!

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

I think you will blow your data away. The only reason it may keep it, if it was the hot spare, but I dought it.

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

Glad I asked...that would have been very dissapointing to say the least.

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

I bought the Seagate 160's and the 4100 recognized them as 130 gb and formated at 128 per disk. So not to bad. Also, updated the ram from 128 to 256 SDRAM 133 and she is humming along.

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

Good deal! Where did you get your low profile 256 MB chip from?

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

On my system I am running an older Intel Mother board, 400mhz FSB that will only use 100/133 memory. So when I bought the 512mb chip I used the cruical 256mb on the SnapServer just to see if it would work and wa la :o)

Re: Snap 4100 hard drive selection question.
 

Just so you know for reference, when I built my array it did warn me that all data on any of the drives would be destroyed. Luckily I backed up first :)