Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleo Home Server 1900....advice on making it usable

[Ronstang 202]

I found this thing NIB in the back of a closet doing some Spring cleaning.  It's the same unit as reviewed HERE except it has no hard drives installed, it is just the server.  It is essentially this Intel unit with different software and no hard drives.  Now this thing is 15 years old in design so I know as is it has limited use but the build quality on this thing is awesome, the case is beautiful and the the way the hard drives go in is really cool too so I would like to make this thing usable if possible and you guys are the most knowledgeable bunch of enthusiasts I know so I need some advice.

Considering it's age I am confident it won't support SATA drives bigger than 2TB which renders it useless in my opinion because I already have 2 16TB Toshiba drives and over a dozen 4TB and a half dozen 3TB Hitachi drives.  Does anyone know if it would be possible to update the BIOS on this thing to accept larger drives?  

If it is possible to update the BIOS would it be possible to erase the DOM and install FreeNAS or something else on it to make it useable?  If working with the existing electronics isn't a possibility then what about gutting it and using the case to house a Raspberry Pi and build a NAS around that?

I'm not going to ramble on anymore asking questions because I know just enough about this to be dangerous, I'd rather let anyone with a suggestion do so.  I would really like to use this thing if possible and I am capable of modding the case in anyway needed I just need a little help with what is the best option for this thing.

Thanks.

[Luke 37095]

If a BIOS update is available it might get you from 2TB support to maybe 4TB, but I doubt all the way to 16 TB. A jump that big usually requires new hardware. The other question is what kind of I/O performance will it have.

[Ronstang 202]

1 hour ago, Luke said:

The other question is what kind of I/O performance will it have.

It has GbE so according to what I have read it's performance is actually pretty good for the time but you have to remember too the hard drives serving it were slower so if it is capable of housing larger drives then the performance should scale accordingly.  For instance, if I transfer files over my GbE network from my older 4 TB drives I get about 60m/s but if I am doing it from one of my 16TB drives I can hit the max the network is capable of which I think is ~125m/s. 

It's probably more realistic to just use this as a case to house a Raspberry Pi build as a NAS.  I don't need much.  All my media has been encoded to provide good quality at very low bit rates so the load is not much on my system.  I can have several people using it and I don't even see a blip in the resource monitor.....unless I let them watch LiveTV then it spikes my network usage.

[Ronstang 202]

I just found a thread over on SNB forums about this unit, well the Intel SS4200E which this is just a rebrand of, and it is a current thread with people still using them with newer drives etc.  It's quite a lengthy thread so I will have to read it when I have time but it looks promising because at the end of a thread one person was saying that out of all the solutions he's had this one still works well with low power draw compared to many others.....this may be a promising piece after all.

[Ronstang 202]

My research has led me to realize these things are far cooler than I first imagined.  From the thread over at SNB I have learned a lot in a short time.  If I dump the original software and go with anything else like OpenMediaVault, FreeNAS, or a Linux based OS then the unit will be fine with larger drives.as the limit is in the software.  As is it has a 4TB hard drive size limit which isn't bad but I'm not going to waste the electricity for 16TB of storage even though I have a stack of 4TB drives.  There are people using these with 8TB drives and then using the eSATA ports with port mulitpliers to attach over 100TB of storage through one of these things so they are completely usable today if you are a tinkerer and don't mind playing with it to get what you want.  I'll share my results when I get around to using this thing.