I don't believe there is an updated bios that would support larger drives.
As for the drive sizes, you don't have to have the same size drives, but the raid 5 would only use the size of the smallest drive in your setup for all drives. So if you put in 2 x 80GB and 2 x 120GB, you'd effectively only have 80GB x (4-1 (raid parity)) = 240ish GB in storage space and the 40 extra GBs on the other 2 drives wouldn't be used.
Edit: I should have noticed the date of the original posting... Oh well, someone might find this useful in the future.
I've just bought a power server 705n with no hard drives. I've read that the biggest drive you can put in is a 120gb.
Nearly true. 120GB is the largest drive you can fully utilise. I have 4x 160GB in my 705n and they max out at 4x 137GB usable. Anything larger than 160GB would be a waste.
Is there any way of upgrading the bios to increase the drive size and do they all have to be the same drive if i want to build a raid 5
Unfortunately not. Snap (the 705n is actually a Snap 4100) never added LBA48 support for the IDE controllers used in this unit. If you want to know more about Snap servers, visit the Wiki http://wiki.procooling.com/index.php/Snap_Server and Forum http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/forumdisplay.php?f=82 . There are newer versions of SnapOS than Dell provides (v3.4.805 added LBA48 support to models other than the 4100 while v4.0.860 is the final SnapOS and supports 2003 Active Directory) but they are not free downloads and would require de-OEMing the 705n into a standard 4100.
It is STRONGLY recommended that you use identical drives in RAID mode as if one is slower than the others it could cause the SnapOS to fail the slow drive breaking your RAID array. That said, I have 3x Seagate 7200.9 and 1x 7200.7 (all 160GB 2MB cache models) in mine and have not run into any problems.
As was already pointed out, the smallest drive in your RAID5 group will determine the volume size (and make sure the smallest is drive 0).
Dev Mgr
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October 14th, 2005 16:00
As for the drive sizes, you don't have to have the same size drives, but the raid 5 would only use the size of the smallest drive in your setup for all drives. So if you put in 2 x 80GB and 2 x 120GB, you'd effectively only have 80GB x (4-1 (raid parity)) = 240ish GB in storage space and the 40 extra GBs on the other 2 drives wouldn't be used.
chrisclarke11
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October 14th, 2005 18:00
ymo
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January 2nd, 2009 23:00
Edit: I should have noticed the date of the original posting... Oh well, someone might find this useful in the future.
Nearly true. 120GB is the largest drive you can fully utilise. I have 4x 160GB in my 705n and they max out at 4x 137GB usable. Anything larger than 160GB would be a waste.
Unfortunately not. Snap (the 705n is actually a Snap 4100) never added LBA48 support for the IDE controllers used in this unit. If you want to know more about Snap servers, visit the Wiki http://wiki.procooling.com/index.php/Snap_Server and Forum http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/forumdisplay.php?f=82 . There are newer versions of SnapOS than Dell provides (v3.4.805 added LBA48 support to models other than the 4100 while v4.0.860 is the final SnapOS and supports 2003 Active Directory) but they are not free downloads and would require de-OEMing the 705n into a standard 4100.
It is STRONGLY recommended that you use identical drives in RAID mode as if one is slower than the others it could cause the SnapOS to fail the slow drive breaking your RAID array. That said, I have 3x Seagate 7200.9 and 1x 7200.7 (all 160GB 2MB cache models) in mine and have not run into any problems.
As was already pointed out, the smallest drive in your RAID5 group will determine the volume size (and make sure the smallest is drive 0).