Snap 2200 - Mirror Problems.
 

Hi Everyone..
New to the forum and new owner of snap 2200..

Company was getting rid of several 2200's, i was able to get a 2200 500gb model.
Problem was there were no drives..
Another coworker got the same model, but with 250gb drives.
Bought 2 500gb Western Digital EIDE drives for my system, but didn't have the OS image.
Since my coworkers was working fine, we decided to take the lower drive out of his, and slap in one of my 500gb drives (we were told the OS image would be copied over). This seemed to work fine. I than proceeded to take the hard drive and put it back in my 2200 as the top drive. Threw in the other 500gb drive in the lower slot.
So far so good. After turning it on, was able to connect through the web interface and begin configuring it. I went to change the disk configuration from 2 seperate to Dataprotection (mirrored). It began to do the rebuild but than always fail at about 72% and than no disk activity at all. I lose the web connection as well. The only way is to shut down and restart, but then the process of rebuilding happens again. This just repeats over and over again. By the way it takes about 12hours to get to that 72% mark (is that normal)??
I could reset everything back to 2 seperate drives and work that way, but would really prefer to have them mirrored.
would appreciate if anyone can help out...
Thanks...

Re: Snap 2200 - Mirror Problems.
 

The 500gig drives taxes the power supply pretty hard. If you look at the current draw (x2 for 2 drives) and see if it's exceeding the 4amp 12v power supply. The MB will draw around 1 amps including the fan. I know it does on the startup surge.

Another issuse may be heat. I would setup a external fan if you have the case open. When open up the unit does not draw the air to cool the MB properly, with the drives heating it up. And verify the fan is working properly. With the larger drives it would not hurt to add a higher cfm fan. Snap used a low noise low cfm fan in these units.

Re: Snap 2200 - Mirror Problems.
 

Thanks for the suggestion, but I Continue to have problems with the western digital 500gb drives. Tried mirroring again with case open in a Frigid room fan blowing right on the unit, but same thing happened. Stops responding at exactly 72%. Borrowed coworkers 2200 server and slapped the drives in his, thinking perhaps there was something wrong with mine. Same thing happened in his server, 72%. Odd thing is that it works fine with the drives set as Individual Disks. So i'm not so sure that overheating is the issue.. Any other ideas out there? Do you think i should try another brand, Maxtor 500gb, or do you think that its the size that may be causing the issue... Once again, i'd appreciate ANY ideas..

Re: Snap 2200 - Mirror Problems.
 

That's strange, but intereting. I would run Spinrite on the drives. You may be hitting a section on the media that is using the Smart Tech to replace bad sectors. The snap OS is very very sensitive to timming.

I had problems with a new set of Seagates. It was a combo of 2 things on mine, bad sectors (back to back) and seek problems. Spinrite corrected the bad sectors, mapped them out. The seeks were not completly cleared, but minimized.

Re: Snap 2200 - Mirror Problems.
 

Thanks for the help.. I did what you suggested and ran Spinrite on the drives. Primary Drive (top) ran without issue. I couldn't even get it to run on the second (bottom)drive. Went out and bought a 3rd drive (western digital again). Same thing, spinrite wouldn't run against it. Decided to try the mirror anyway (don't know why i thought it would work), but failed at 72% again. 3 western digital drives bought from 3 different Best Buy stores and 2 were no good. Returned the drives (btw they were WD Caviar SE WD5000AAJB drives). Went online and ordered 2 Maxtor 500Gb drives (Maxtor 500GB EIDE STM305004N1AAA-RK). Ran the same process as i explained in the first post... Ran the Mirror without any problems...
Once again, thanks for your help...
And to anyone else out there, stay away from Western Digital!!

Re: Snap 2200 - Mirror Problems.
 

Hmmm, I dunno. I have 8 of them in two 4400 units and I like them...

Re: Snap 2200 - Mirror Problems.
 

As usual the SnapOS hardware is very limited in what it likes. There was a time that Maxtors would not even be reconised. This may fall into the 24bit file structure that the SnapOS uses. The WD may be using a smaller sector size. My guess is WD has a utility for setting this.

I'm not a fan of Maxtor's. I have had 2 DOA and several fail in 1 mo. And when they fail, make sure you have a immediate spare available. I have seen these fail within days of each other.