Upgrading Quantum Snap Server Capacity?

panicboy asks: "I had a client (a dotcom casualty) give me a new, unused 40GB Quantum Snap! Server in lieu of payment. I'd like to replace the pair of 20GB drives inside the thing with something larger -- say, a pair of 80GB drives. If this is possible, the thing would rock; right now, it's probably not quite enough storage to be worth using. I've looked for sites that might explain how to do this, but no luck so far. Anyone have any suggestions? I'd hate to have to sell the thing."

Re:These things suck!

[djweis]

Even better, the 120 gig unit I owned managed to erase two of the four drives. Their advance replacement took over a week to arrive and then they charged my credit card for the deposit after I returned the broken one.
They said that I should upgrade the software in the unit I just received because they upped the timeout for IDE commands from 2 seconds to 20 seconds. That seemed severely wrong to me.
Throw it away, or pull the drives and put them in something better.

Re:These things suck!

[Llama Keeper]

These things are wonderful. My company ought the 240 rack mount to replace an aging CD-ROM tower. We just copy the disk images up and viola no friggin broken CD-ROM's and takes up less space in the crowded server room.

THe NFS implementation sucks though since its on FAT32 but for the money.... if you just need space for your MP3's these boxes rock.

40GB

[Enoch]

40GB isn't enough?
How many mp3's do you have?

Jeremy

These things suck!

[fosh]

Hey man,

Sorry, but someone was going to have to break the news to you sometime. My company bought one of these things, thinking we could use it for people to store thier data on, seeing as how it supported NFS and all. But, there is one little catch, is NFS on a FAT32 fs, which means no ownership, no symlinks, and no permissions. Sorry, these things aren't useful for much other than a whole crap load of MP3s.

But, knowing this might give you some insight as to how to format new drives, (I would guess FAT32).

Sorry to have to ruin your dreams
--Alex

Re:Completely useless

[compwizrd]

You'd have to talk to Andre Hedrick, because I'm going by what he's said. He's the IDE guy of linux.

Re:Completely useless

[billcopc]

I don't quite understand why you'd need drivers for it. Even the windows drivers are redundant and simply serve to prevent bluescreens when hot-swapping drives, otherwise the thing just runs natively with the onboard bios. Although I haven't tried installing Linux on my main pc since I've installed the FastTrak, I wouldn't mind some details on this topic if you're saying I won't be able to run linux at all until they resolve this.

Well, If you don't want the thing...

[ffsnjb]

I'm sure I'd love to have that much space on my lan. I'm lucky to have the 4.3gig drive in my webserver (mrnutty). If only college wasn't so damn expensive. Oh, and this machine has 2 1 gig drives. Guh.

Some actual information

[msuzio]

I hate to post genuine information, but () try the Quantum site itself. They have numerous technical FAQs that could have the information you need, and they appear to take suggests for more questions:

http://www.quantum.com/support/knowledge_base.ht m

Re:Huh

[MemRaven]

In all likelihood the on-board OS which is handling requests is ON the hard drives themselves, which means that if you just gank the hard drives and put in new ones, it won't know what to do and will just be broken.

If, however, the hard drives are JUST data (i.e. firmware OS) then there's a pretty good chance that it assumes that it's got pre-formatted hard drives. Unless you format them, there's a very good chance that again, it's a no-go and you'll break everything.

And then finally, even if you were to know that you needed to format them, in what format? Do you know the FS format for them? If not, how exactly do you intend to get them ready?

Remember, this isn't something which has a boot prompt to which you can just install linux. It's an embedded system. Unless you're willing to really play, you're not going to figure out that much by just breaking the things.

Re:Completely useless

[compwizrd]

Even if you use the full FastTrak card, you can't do "hardware" raid under linux as of this date. Promise is paranoid about their IP. So just use a stock Promise Ultra/100, the ide patches at http://www.linux-ide.org, and the raid patches at http://www.linuxraid.org, and andrea's vm patches available somewhere or another on kernel.org.

Or just run 2.4.x =)

Propetory hardware.

[shippo]

Be careful. Even if the OS itself is in ROM, and you manage to get the correct filesystem installed, you could still have problems.

I worked with some since dead specialised hardware which required the disks to contain special signatures written outside of the filesystem, otherwise the filesystem wouldn't get mounted. They may have used special disk firmware as well. You had to use an undocumented mechanism to format a drive sucessfully, only known to the manufacturers own tech-support engineers.

What have you done yet?

[GeneralEmergency]

Have you opened it up yet? Do you at least know what kind of drives you're dealing with? Is the OS on the disk or in firmware? Are there any dipswitches in the MB and are they labeled? Does the managements software have any obvious references to HDD or volume size?

If you're a hardware newbie, then post hight res digital pics for us to examine and comment on.

Basically, if they turn out to be IDE drives, the investment in a pair of drives is reasonably small and experimentation is a good path. I'd use something like Ghost or Partition Magic (I know, PC stuff) to move the images to the larger drives.

Also, you are reasonable to proceed on the assumption that the original engineers kept an eye open to expansion and/or tollerating multiple HDD sources, which would invariably come in differing sizes and block/sector translation modes.

Hope this helps.

"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --

Completely useless

[billcopc]

I hate to say this, but IMHO you'd be better off selling the thing and using the money to buy a bunch of IDE drives and an ATA/Raid card (or just mod a cheap Promise Ultra100). Put that in your favorite P133 and load up NT or Linux. You'll probably even have a bit of cash left to buy Jolt and Guinness.