Converting a Server’s SCSI Backplane to Use SATA Drives

I eventually landed a SnapServer 4100, a nice little 1U-high rack mountable box that could expand to give me just over 360MB of RAID-5 storage. The on-board chipset could theoretically handle drives larger than 127MB, but a glitch in the OS meant that the proper driver to enable the chipset was missing. The OS could theoretically be modified to accept the larger drives but the manufacturer would have to do it—and they had no incentive to steal sales away from their newer, larger-capacity servers. Many people on the ProCooling forums have spent time analyzing and bemoaning the situation but none of them apparently have the chops to dump and disassemble the OS, then patch and recompile it for the benefit of all. (That includes myself, though I’ve often thought about poking around to see what I could do.) I gave up on going that route when I determined that the total expandability of the unit with such a patch would only be 1 terabyte. I wanted more, much more—ideally I want a RAIDzilla, but I don’t think I’d ever use that much disk space.


This project involved a lot of experimentation, from removing connectors to laying bus lines and LED cables. Everything’s functional but not as neat as I like things to be.