As a couple of you know, I recently came into posession of a model 4000 SNAP! server. Just wanted to post some first impressions and observations. I would also be curious to know if anyone else has had any experience with these.

First let me say that I'm not really a fan of Quantum hard drives. I've seen quite a few fail over the last 2-3 years. Now, to be fair, nearly all the failures I've seen are the Bigfoot IDE drives, so maybe it's that line that is a problem.

The SNAP! server is 4 IDE hard drives that can be set up in several different configs, depending on what's more important to you; storage space, or data integrity. You can combine all 4 drives into one big volume (the factory default config), or split things up so that each drive is a seperate volume. The unit supports disk mirroring and RAID 5 for data protection, but you sacrifice storage space for for this. In the disk mirroring config you get 50% of the rated capactiy, while RAID 5 will yield 75% of rated capacity.

The unit I have (actually a beta unit) is factory configured with four 30GB drives, yielding 120GB of storage. However, this is not what you get as a final result. Apparently, there are some system files, html files (you can access and admin the server through a browser), and some other overhead that use up some space, so my final yield is 109GB. Still not too shabby, IMO.

Quantum advertises the SNAP! server line as the easiest way to add storage to your network and so far I can see nothing to argue that. Setup was almost as easy as plugging everything in and turning it on. It would have been exactly that simple had it not been for the fact that the 4000 had managed to still have an IP address that conflicted with another box on my home network. A simple reset of the IP address (covered in the manual) and things were up and running without conflicts.

Since I had recieved this unit second hand, I also decided to completely reset the device to factory defaults (also covered in the manual) and reformat the drives. After resetting the server, I connected to the unit using NS 4.61 for OS/2, assigned a new administrator password, formatted the drives, configured all the network protovols I intended to use (in this case, Novell IPX/SPX and UNIX NFS), and added users to the system.

Since the SNAP! emulates a Novell 3.12 server, I initially had a little bit of difficulty getting a drive mapped to the SNAP! server in the login script, but that was more due to my unfamiliarity with mixed Novell environments ( I use a 4.11 IntraNetware server at home). Once I had created a server object in NWAdmin for the SNAP!, things went better, but I've noticed a few "quirks". Fortunately, they're not show-stoppers and the workarounds are not objectional (at least to me). Here's what I found:

1) Even though the drive mapping to the SNAP! is in the Novell 4.11 login script, neither of my Win9x clients (one Win95, the other Win98SE) will process the mapping. They behave as if the line in the login script doesn't exist. This may have something to do with the fact that I'm only using the default Novell client that comes with Win9x. If I used a current Novell Client32 package, this would probably not be a problem. My work around is to simply do a manual drtive mapping and force a reconnect at logon. Seems to work fine, as far as I can tell.

2) My OS/2 box, the NT 4.0 box, and the W2K laptop all pause at the part of the login script that calls the SNAP! server, waiting for a user name. If you give it the same user name that you are connecting to the Novell 4.11 server with, it continues on without asking for the password. If you specify another user, you must supply the password as well. For NT 4.0 and W2K I suspect that same issue here as with the Win9x clients. If I was using a Novell Client32 package on either of them this would probably not be an issue. For the OS/2 box, I have to live with it, but for 109GB of storage I can't say I'm upset about it. ;-) With DOS and OS/2 name space installed as defaults, long file names won't be a problem, either.

All in all, I'm quite pleased with the SNAP! so far and look forward to the increased storage to expand my collection of software and MP3s. We'll see how it stands up over the next few months, but right now I give it 2 "Thumbs Up".

So don't take it as gospel. ;-) Just relating my experience with them.

I'm thinking of posting that same review to another place I habit, so I'd like to know if there's enough information in it to be worthwhile. Anything I missed that I could add? Should I leave out the bit about the Quantum Bigfoot?