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Originally Posted by Peter
I'm working on solving 137Gb limitation on 4100 snap server.
At this stage I'm collecting informations about hardware.
More specificaly I'm looking for somebody who has knowledge about Intel 82371 PIIX4 PCI Set Chip. We are all aware that this unit is fully capable of utilizing larger drives (over 137GB) I belive that with my knowledge of hardware and a software Guru's knowledge we can simply enable LBA48 support. Look forward to your comments. Please respond to this thread or send me a PM.
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As some background, I had independently perfected disk upgrades on the 1100 / 2000 / 4100 before the original article was posted here. I have email correspondence with Snap engineers if anyone demands proof. I've also done a bunch of other stuff that hasn't been discussed here at all, but that's not relevant to this discussion...
Anyway, the 4100 uses a pair of Promise dual-channel IDE controllers. That gives you 4 master/slave pairs, though the Snap OS ignores anything on the slave ports for performance reasons.
Promise never officially supported LBA48 on the chipset used in the 4100, though both FreeBSD and Linux have LBA48 support for that chipset, so it is definitely possible. I spent a few months exchanging email with Snap engineers and marketing people about getting LBA48 support added to the 4100 (I had been running 2 dozen or so 480GB 4100's, of which only one was purchased as a 480GB model). For various reasons, including it being a mature model and not wanting to encourage field upgrades, they decided not to add LBA48 support to the 4100. Given the way the OS is packaged and installed on the 4100, it is unlikely that users will be able to implement this themselves.
This is one of the reasons I stopped using 4100's and switched to homebuilt file servers (6TB in 3RU, much higher performance than a 4100) which I document
here.