Quote:
Originally Posted by Phoenix32
I think some people around here might get offended at your comment about nobody here having "the Chops" to do the conversion on the 4100. Plenty of people here, or at least during that time frame, had/have the chops to do it.
|
Indeed. I had been independently upgrading 4100's to 120GB drives for over a year before I discovered this site. I also had/have a few other tricks up my sleeve related to Snap Extensions which have never been documented on this site.
Quote:
|
As a side note, YOU WERE WRONG IN WHAT YOU SAID IN THAT BLOG. It was not about a driver in the SNAP OS, it was in the firmware/BIOS. That is not an easy mod and was just not worth doing.
|
Actually, as far as I know, I have the most detail on what was going on, since I had gotten as far as convincing Snap engineering that it was possible and was working on getting pricing to have the work done...
The reason that the 4100's didn't get LBA48 support at the same time as the rest of the legacy Snap product line was because the Snap engineering staff was under the impression that it was not possible to do it on the particular Promise controller which was (only) used in the 4100. I sent them a set of LBA48 diffs against the FreeBSD driver for the chip in question, and pointed them to the Linux driver, which also did LBA48.
The only BIOS issue is that the operating system (on disk-based OS units like the 1100) needs to be within the first 127GB of the drive as the BIOS doesn't know about LBA48. On flash-based OS units like the 4100, this is irrelevant as the OS is in flash.
What it eventually boiled down to was that there was no amount of money that could convince Snap to provide a feature whose sole purpose was to enable customers to avoid the need to purchase new Snap products.