[wren337]

1.2TB, that rocks. What are you going to be doing with them all?

I really went out of my way tio get 120Gb drives based on some other posts, I regret not trying 160's now. 360Gb is ok for now but I expect to fill it in a year or two easily.

Originally Posted by yvette176

here's the results from my snap 4000 upgrade:

the log showing the 24h19m process that took four maxtor maxlineII 300gb drives and formatted them into an 842Gb raid5 array is attached, and the "view disk status" display showing the 842Gb raid5 array is also attached. before allocating them to the raid5 array they showed as a 1.2Tb JBOD, which was quite cool.

pertinent 4000 info:

bios 2.0.252
os 3.4.805(us)
h/w 2.0.1

notable events:

--> the process took a weekend, between the experimenting with the correct cabling options (use cable select when you jumper the drives!!!), the "do i need to copy the first 50,000 disk sectors from the old drive 0x10000 or is the image in flash?" analysis, et al.
--> do not try to use assist to reload the image - the opsys in flash memory will drop itself down onto the new array just fine.
--> after the first reboot, it only saw two drives. i formatted those and rebooted again, and it found all four on the next reboot.
--> before you start the process, make sure you have turned off the option "auto-correct disk errors at startup"; otherwise, it will run the "check" option on each new drive, which takes forever.
--> be sure to mark which old drive is which ("front top, front bottom, etc.) before you forget, in case you have to go back to the old drive setup for some reason.

i'm not sure why the bios+h/w+os combo above accepted the 300Gb drives with no issues - maybe i'm lucky. if you encounter problems, maybe try putting the old drives back in, use assist to install 3.4.805 (and bios 2.0.252, if possible) and try again.

total cost, not including the 4000: about $1000, not bad for a 1.2Tb server!

oh yes - i couldn't get the raid5 allocation process to run in 64mb. i dropped in 256mb and it ran much better. fwiw.

now - only three more to go! <groan>
yvette