Mystery of the disappearing drive space - 4400

[hyp3r]

Hi All,

Wonder if you can help me. I've aquired (legally! ) a snap server 4400. It came with 4x120GB and I upgraded the drives to 4x320 however, on RAID5 I'm not seeing as much available space as I expected.

The drives are being recognised by the server on boot as being 320Gb (298) as below

                                        D0 MAXTOR STM3320820A  LBA          298G
B  Ultra DMA 5                          D1 Not Detected
D2 MAXTOR STM3320820A  LBA          298GB  Ultra DMA 5
D3 Not Detected                         D4 MAXTOR STM3320820A  LBA          298G
B  Ultra DMA 5                          D5 Not Detected
D6 MAXTOR STM3320820A  LBA          298GB  Ultra DMA 5
D7 Not Detected
IDE BUS Master Enabled

Which should surely equate to 3x320 (960Gb) usable with one complete drive lost to RAID5 parity (1.28Tb in total). However, when I go to the webbased admin section I see the following:

Location	Model	Size	Status
Drive 1 	312 GB MAXTOR-STM33208	236,205MB 	Member of md0 (RAID 5)
Drive 2 	312 GB MAXTOR-STM33208	236,205MB 	Member of md0 (RAID 5)
Drive 3 	312 GB MAXTOR-STM33208	236,205MB 	Member of md0 (RAID 5)
Drive 4 	312 GB MAXTOR-STM33208	236,205MB 	Member of md0 (RAID 5)

=========================================================

RAID Set Name:	md0
RAID Set Type:	RAID 5 (checksummed)
RAID Size:	708,480 MB
RAID Status:	OK

Location	Model	Size	Status	Actions
Drive 1	312 GB MAXTOR-STM33208	236,204MB	OK	Remove
Drive 2	312 GB MAXTOR-STM33208	236,204MB	OK	Remove
Drive 3	312 GB MAXTOR-STM33208	236,204MB	OK	Remove
Drive 4	312 GB MAXTOR-STM33208	236,204MB	OK	Remove

Only 708.5Gb usable... where have I lost ~200Gb too!?!?!

Originally Posted by Isysxp

Just a short note giving an outline of recovering a 4400:

Original system from Quantum: Guardian 4400 256Mb + 996 MHz PIII
Disks 4* Deskstar IC35L120 (123.5GB)
OS Guardian 2.6.050

1 drive failed after 5 years therfores good idea to replace all of then.

1. Remove all old drives except drive 1 (left hand slot)
2. Put 1 new drive into slot 2 I used a Seagate 400GB
3. Power up and wait a while and you should be able to access the system via the webadmin pages as before.
4. Check Storage->Devices and see if the new drive is in the list (if not ... wait!)
5. Shutdown and move the new drive in slot 2 into slot 1.
6. Power up and with luck the system will boot OK. Check via webadmin. If This does not seem to work, attach a terminal to the serial port (115200,n8) and see what is happening. If the system appears to be regularly re-booting, start again.
7. After reboot and the system is up, plug in the rest of the new drives and wait.
8. Check Storage->Devices and you should see all of the new drives with the correct disk sizes. (Mine now shows 4*365Mb)
9. Rebuild you RAID sets etc. and have a nice day.

Best of, Isysxp

I followed the above and all was fine until step 8 - I didn't ever see the drives showing the size I expected in Storage->Devices.

sh-2.04$ df -aTH
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md100root xfs    554M  316M  239M  57% /
none          proc       0     0     0   -  /proc
/dev/volgr0/lvol0
               xfs    743G  429G  314G  58% /hd/vol_mnt0
/hd/vol_mnt0/shares
               xfs    743G  429G  314G  58% /shares/SHARE1
/hd/vol_mnt0/backexcat/db
              none    743G  429G  314G  58% /var/backex/db
/hd/vol_mnt0/backexcat/sched
              none    743G  429G  314G  58% /var/backex/sched
/hd/vol_mnt0/backexcat/logs
              none    743G  429G  314G  58% /var/backex/logs
/hd/vol_mnt0/ca_antivirus
              none    743G  429G  314G  58% /apps/ca/antivirus/mnt

Is my understanding flawed or has something gone wrong when I replaced the original 120Gb drive with my new one?

There's one thing that I would tell myself if I were you guys, get the new OS. However, when I followed advice on this forum and asked Adaptec straight for the "free" v3.4xxx OS they simply just directed me to their service contracts, which I can't afford to punt out. Should they give out the 3.4 OS if I hassle them?

Server Model: Snap Server 4400
OS Version: 2.6.050

Heeeeeelp.

Thanks

[re3dyb0y]

Yes, 320 x 3 = 960

But have you ever noticed on pc's for example, you never get the full amount


You lose space for file structure, system overheads and such



And you have a guardian unit



There is no 3.4 - That is the snap os



Oh, and, i wouldn't have used maxtor drives

No way

[blue68f100]

From the manual, Guardian OS:

Determining Capacity
The factory default configuration reduces potential capacity to provide a high
degree of data protection and backup capability. By default, Snap Server disk drives
are all part of the default RAID 5 created during the manufacturing process. In a
RAID 5 configuration, the capacity of one drive is used for data protection, reducing
the available capacity of the server by one drive. The GuardianOS runs from a
protected partition, which consumes approximately 10 GB of space from each disk
depending on the total capacity of the disk drive. Snapshots are active by default,
with 20% of the default RAID assigned to snapshot space and 80% of the default
RAID assigned to the primary data volume.
For example, to calculate the capacity of a Snap Server 4500 with 480 GB total
capacity in its default state, consider both the hardware and software
configuration:
• The four 120 GB disk drives provide 110 GB of formatted capacity.
• The four disks when joined in a RAID 5 configuration net 330 GB of capacity for
the RAID.
• The snapshot space is 20% of the space available on the RAID, reducing the space
on the RAID for the data volume by 66 GB.
This results in a data volume capacity of 264 GB for this Snap Server 4500/480 GB.
On a Snap Server 18000, all eight drives are incorporated into the default RAID 5.
On a Snap Server 14000, eleven drives are incorporated into the default RAID 5 and
one drive is preconfigured as a hot spare for the default RAID. The capacity of the
hot spare is not included in the total capacity of the volume or snapshot space.

Why are you installing Maxtor drives which have the highest failure rate of any drive on the market? Do you not value your data. You should move to the WD RE drives.

[hyp3r]

I had a suspect feeling that it could be related to the parity striping however I couldn't see that it took as much of a percentage as I was "missing" from the 320's compared to the 120's.

As for the Maxtor's - I've had maxtors in the past and not really had much of a problem with them, all being so, all the data thats going to be on this box is already safely backed up on another machine (which does coincidently run WD drives) so I figured that, combined with RAID5 on the snap, I should be ok .

Thanks guys!