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."

Comments

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.