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SS4000-E : Questions on pushing the limits

idata
Employee
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Hello,

BACKGROUND: according to the support document at http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/ss4000-e/sb/CS-022215.htm http://www.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/ss4000-e/sb/CS-022215.htm , the SS4000-E w/ firmware 1.4 v710 is stated to have a maximum capacity of 3TB.

MY QUESTION: Is that a limitation of the software design of the firmware, or was that number based on hard drive sizes available at the time?

WHY I ASK:

I write this with the hope that one of the support members has tried this, or one of the community members may have tried this.

I bought several of these SS4000-E boxes, new from a reseller blowing them out at a very low price.

Disclaimer: I understand that it's past end-of-sale and is end-of-support. And, I understand the list of limited "supported" hard drives. I have read the documentation available. (So, I acknowledge that this is a "message-in-a-bottle" support request that may or may not be answered.)

That being said, it looks like the SS4000-E with 1.4 v710 firmware will work with 2TB drives. (Notice that I did not say "supported" as they are not on the list of supported drives)

...at least, it LOOKS like it does when I plug 4 of them in them into the SS4000-E box, and set them up in RAID 5, and create 3 partitions (2 @ 2048 [1.99TB each] , one w/ remainder space [1.45TB])

So far, so good.

Then, since I do have these three partitions, I began restoring data to these drives. (Using a free product "SyncBack", a third party program, and this is running in a Win7 home environment)

I filled up my 2TB public partition and started to add data to my 2TB public-2 partition... when that was done, I found that I received a "DISK CHANGE NOTIFICATION" message upon logging in. I could not reach one of the partitions.

Well, I did not change the disk, and I could not tell if there was a failure, and I could not get past that screen. I did verify that the disk sizes and serial numbers recognized by the Intel ss4000-e firmware were EXACTLY the same. And, the disks on that page stated no errors

So, I reinitialized and restarted. (Yes, I always have a back-up for my backup. I am a technologist, I have no faith in any single-point solution).

This time, I stated restoring with "public-3" (w/ 391GB of data) and then "public-2" (w/ 1.1TB of data) ... everything seemed to be going well. I stopped and started my restore several times along the way without problems.

However, when I got to the end of restoring the second partition, AGAIN, I found that I had received a "DISK CHANGE NOTIFICATION " error.

And, of course, again, no disk failure or change, with all lights on the box a happy shade of green.

I DID notice, this time that the solution said: "Current state: RAID 5 (NORMAL, Resync : 73 %, Finish : 1873 min, Speed : 4540K/sec)"

Here is a screenshot, resync numbers have changed slightly:

And, I can reach my mapped "public-2" and "public-3" partitions and see and use that data on those partitions, but I cannot reach my mapped system-created "public" partition. (And, if I access the resource directly, I can access "admin", public-2", "public-3", but not "public".)

Of course, as I have the "DISK CHANGE NOTIFICATION" message screen, I cannot get past that to see if that partition still exists on the system or not.

So, THIS time, rather than reinitializing and starting over, I am choosing to let the RAID restore process run and see what may be the result in a day or two. (if it will actually work or not)

But ultimately, I want to know: Is the 3TB limit mentioned in the documentation something that may be causing the system (with 4 2TB Drives) to believe it has had a failure?

... and will it ever work with 4 @ 2TB drives?

I hope for a response. I will post my RAID restore results here in a few days time.

Thanks,

v.

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idata
Employee
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zebraitis,

I appreciate your detail for investigating this. However, we know that the 1.4 firmware for the SS4000 was created to allow for support for drives greater than 500 GB. The SS4000 was officially discontinued July 1, 2008. The last Tested hardware and operating system list was published February 2008 and contained one "officially" tested 1TB HDD. We don't know from a validation standpoint how drives that are not tested will function. If a customer chooses to use non-validated components, the operational testing becomes their responsibility. It looks like you've performed more than enough testing to determine that the 2TB HDDs you're using may not be reliable enough.

Again, thanks for your effort and I wish the results would have been more favorable.

Regards,

 

John
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