By: Joe 10/16/01

In concept it sounds too good to be true, but then you check the price tag and see that a 10GB device back then was costing almost 1000$, with a 5GB down around 500$.  That is the main reason you prolly haven't heard of a "Snap!" sever.  They were priced WAY out of reach for the general public, also they were fairly slow over the network compared to local storage.

With storage prices crumbling ( HD's, Ram, DVD-R, CD-R) These servers have for the most part left the home user arena and centered on where they CAN be used and where the money is, Enterprises.   Meridian was bought out by Quantum  around the time this change happened. So all the Snap servers became "Quantum Snap Servers".  They now produce Storage solutions from the "low" size of 20 GB to a Terabytes of scaleable storage. But they are still extremely expensive for the size you get.  This brings us to why we are Hacking and Upgrading.
UPDATE: 3/10/02 It seems Snap 1000 boxes are not the same as the others. They may hold parts of the OS on the disk.  SO you can install a second disk but not replace the original one that's in it. JUST FYI!      Check this thread in the Pro/Forums where people are discussing this right now.

Why Upgrade?

It's all about getting more for your money.  Like back in the ProCooling iOpener articles ( here) and ( here ) you take a product that a company sells, and exploit it to get more for your money or work for your specific use. This is very much the same as overclocking, but we are OC'n the storage space and not the CPU ( unfortunately).

The Money aspect.  As I said before, these things are brutally expensive and this is most likely the reason there has not been an article about this on the web yet, cause everyone is SO afraid to open and break these things.  Here is a price comparison :

Now you can see compared to IDE or even the premium and top performance SCSI, the Snap! servers are 1000$ more expensive in some areas.  Now if you were shopping around and saw the 15GB device listing for close to 1800$ cheaper than the 160GB you would prolly want to buy the 15GB instead and then buy 2 80GB HD's and put em in the 15GB server Right!.... well I did ;)

Once opened all you see are the 2 HD's bolted to a removable plate, this was a good sign, it looked like it was made to be swapped out by the Meridian techies if they needed to fix something on an RMA.  Remember folks, when you go into something like this think about what the company may have done to save money on RMA repairs or failure rates. With that in mind I figured that the OS could NOT be on the drives.  No company would want to be faced with a reload of their core OS in the face of a drive failure. So I was on a manhunt for the rest of the secrets in this thing. I took the HD panel off and set it off to the side. and noticed the entire chassis just comes out without any issue.

This is the main board in all its splendor.  This is a true no moving parts full computer right here. Lets break down some of the more interesting parts now:

Flash Ram - Home to the OS
I have found the Home of where they are hide'n the Linux Kernel, its on redundant AMD Flash Ram chips.  Don't know their size cause I cant get access to the OS, but its a nice way to put the kernel in an area that cant be harmed.  This will greatly lower the RMA and repair turn around time on these devices ( thinking from a mfg's perspective). I confirmed these were redundant through a contact at Maxtor ( the guy worked at Quantum and now for Maxtor).

DRAM
Man just when I was getting away from EDO and FPM.. here it comes again. This is 60ns FPM SIMM ram.. 72 pin for those who don't know anything but 168Pin Dimms.  This is a 32mb Simm ( 8x32), I USED to have a qty of 64mb Simms (16x32) around here but have long since sold them off. Let this be a lesson, you can never be too much of a computer gear packrat, you never know when you will need that EGA video card, or that AdLib Sound card. :)

The Chipset is ALi and DOES support large disks. That was my biggest worry when wanting to upgrade this device.  I didn't want to put a 40GB drive on and find out it only could see 8.4GB ( since its from 1998 many BIOS and Chipsets could not handle over 8.4GB without a disk manager.) But that turned out to not be an issue. The Speed IS an issue though.  This machine does not support any type of Ultra ATA, this is strictly PIO Mode (I don't know what mode though).

The Ethernet is Intel 10/100 Pro Nic.  It is one of the better and most up to date features of the machine ( just cause Ethernet technology doesn't become obsolete too fast).

Hacking Cut Short:

There is a serial Header on the board, I have gone through almost EVERY pinout possibility ( Via Multi Meter to see which lines are which to eliminate some possibilities).   NOTHING.  I was really hopping that I would be able to access a serial console to start to work the OS over a bit.   If ANYONE has the proper pin out for that header PLEASE E-mail me.

With this in mind I went on with just trying to upgrade the disks and see what the OS does.  So lets get onto making a mountain of storage out of this mole hill of a device.

The Upgrade, Can it be done?