Larger Drives in 4500

[paulsamuelson]

Has anyone successfully increased the drive size in a 4500, beyond what came from the factory?

I unsuccessfully tried the following,

"Boot with drive 1. The hot swap drive 2. Then power down and move drive 2 to 1. Reboot, then hot swap the rest of the drives."

Now my drives must be marked as having been installed. They show as 488 GB drives but only have 200 some odd available for an array.

Based on reports I have read here, I am not convinced it is even possible to get more space out of a 4500.

Thanks,

Paul Samuelson

[Phoenix32]

Originally Posted by paulsamuelson

Has anyone successfully increased the drive size in a 4500, beyond what came from the factory?

Yes

Originally Posted by paulsamuelson

Based on reports I have read here, I am not convinced it is even possible to get more space out of a 4500.

Read again. I have done it on over 100 units. My units have 2TB and 3TB each.

[paulsamuelson]

I finally had a chance to work on this some more. GuardianOS 2.4 does not allow usable space beyond the smallest drive. However, I upgraded OS to 4.1, and your instructions worked exactly as described. I have no idea what version is required, just not 2.4.

Next problem. I put four 500G drives in it. I am building a RAID5 array, but it is going very slowly. With four 250G drives and OS 2.4, it took about 3 hours to build the array. With 500G drives and OS 4.1, it has been going for 1.5 hours and still shows 0% completed.

I have 512MB of RAM. Would more RAM speed it up?

Thanks,

Paul

[paulsamuelson]

Update -
I switched back to my Seagate drives and it looks to be building the array properly. The Western Digital drives I had in it were set to Cable Select, which apparently does not work. I think they need to be forced to Master.

I am currently at 2% after 10 minutes, so I think it is fixed.

Would there be any benefit to more memory? I have a low user count, but it can get busy at times.

Thanks,

Paul

[blue68f100]

Most all GOS units want MASTER jumper settings. Some of the SOS units are mixed.

[r3zon8]

Originally Posted by paulsamuelson

Has anyone successfully increased the drive size in a 4500, beyond what came from the factory?

I unsuccessfully tried the following,

"Boot with drive 1. The hot swap drive 2. Then power down and move drive 2 to 1. Reboot, then hot swap the rest of the drives."

Now my drives must be marked as having been installed. They show as 488 GB drives but only have 200 some odd available for an array.

Based on reports I have read here, I am not convinced it is even possible to get more space out of a 4500.

Thanks,

Paul Samuelson

im assuming this method will break the raid5 on the old(smaller) disks that were in there.

I have only 1 4500 running 4.1.106 and need more space...but if anything happens during the upgrade process I'd like to know that I can drop the 4 original drives back in and the machine will still come up as before i started working on it...

ps. any benefits to looking/paying for an updated GOS version?

[blue68f100]

As you go up in drive size you do need more memory for caching. I would expect 1gig to be bare min. I have 1.5 gig in mine. Phoniex32 recommends a 2gig min, saying it gives the best performance.

I keep one HD loaded with the GOS just encase something goes south. If your not using any thing that keep tracks of HD's id's (AV, backup, snapshots...) you should be able to power down and do a complete drive swap. I have not done it but I bet Andy has tested this. But he's a full believer in clean installs.

To keep your working set in tact, you could power down and replace drive 2 with your higher capacity hd. Boot the 4500, watch for the OS to be copied over normally around the 6 min mark. Once finished power back down and installed your original HD. You will have to have it rebuild the array. Once complete your original set is now complete. Power down and mark drive position on all HD's, remove and install the new HD's with the one with the OS in drive 1 position. Boot the 4500 and your starting on new slate. I would even do a clean install to confirm everything is right.

Now inorder to get your data over to the new hd set you will need to copy the data to your local machine. Then copy it back to the new set one the array is built.

The newer os has added more features. You now have Raid 6 and 10 has been added along with full support for Vista Win7 and AD2008?