How many SATA drives can the appliance accept? What is the capacity of each? I would like to immediately upgrade the memory to maybe 4 TB upon purchase. Can I put 2 - 2TB drives inside? I realize I can attatch a USB external. Is there more than one USB port? What are the RAID capabilities?
Thanks from a prospective buyer.
Mitch
The VortexBox appliance is very small and only has room for 1 drive. I could remove the CD and add a second drive. That would get you to 4TB. It doesn't have RAID you can use the 6 USB ports to attach an external derive for backup.
I could build a 4TB box for $685. You could use an external USB DVD drive for ripping.
Can I just replace the 1TB drive with a 2TB 3 1/2" SATA drive? Or wll that mean that software upgrades will not work without modification?
What if in addition,l I replace the CD drive with (what another SATA--is there a connector already in there?) would that make the software update inoperable?
The one thing I don't want to do is lose the convenience of Andrew's upgrades----for me this is a major advantage of the VBA.
TIA, George
gsawdy said:[*]Can I just replace the 1TB drive with a 2TB 3 1/2″ SATA drive? Or wll that mean that software upgrades will not work without modification? [*]What if in addition,l I replace the CD drive with (what another SATA–is there a connector already in there?) would that make the software update inoperable?[*]The one thing I don't want to do is lose the convenience of Andrew's upgrades—-for me this is a major advantage of the VBA.
TIA, George
George,
I just changed my VBA's 1 TB disk to a 2 TB disk. You can get the disk at Andrew's Amazon linked store and Andrew will receive some benefit.
[*]You can replace the 1TB drive with a 2TB 3 1/2″ SATA drive.
Software upgrades will work without modification[*]The VBA has two SATA connectors. One goes to the fixed disk, the other goes to the DVD/CD drive. You could replace the DVD/CD drive with a second fixed disk and use an external DVD/CD drive attached to one of the USB ports for loading ISOs and ripping disks. These changes would continue to allow software update.
To change to 2 TB, you must:
- Download the current VortexBox ISO image to your computer.
- Burn the ISO to a CD with your computer.
An ISO-burning link is given on Andrew's instructions. Do not just burn to disk without ensuring that an ISO IMAGE is being produced, or even though the MD5 checksum will be correct, the non-image CD will not boot on the VBA. (Personal experience.)
- Make a backup copy of all your media files, as they will have to be restored to the 2 TB disk.
- Make the disk swap. It's easy. Six screws as I recall to get to the four screws that hold in the 1 TB disk. There are no jumpers to consider.
- Boot the VBA with the ISO disk and follow the instructions.
- Copy the backed-up media files to the 2 TB VBA.
- (Your removed 1 TB disk could be restored if something fails, and contains all your media.)
Andrew, will you please correct anything wrong, overlooked, and add additional advice if needed?
PS: I used the numbering and bulleting features of this forum to format the above response, and they remain visible in this edit, yet I see they do not show in the posted version. Andrew has requested that multi-question posts be numbered. Will you look into this Andrew? It will make posts lots easier to understand.
Wow, Halfbit. Thank you for the very thorough answer. It sounds easily doable and I will definitely replace the 1TB drive.
I'm using dBpoweramp on an old notebook to rip my CDs so I don't have a use for the CD/DVD now. If the second 2 TB HD is installed how does the OS see it? As a second drive or can both be merged into one 4 TB drive? If one had ~4 T of music that would impose considerable demands on the backup USB system. Is there no way the second HD could be some sort of psuedo backup? It wouldn't be physically removable from the location of the VBAbut maybe it could be powered off so it was immune to power surges. l
Obviously I'm just wildly speculating now!
George
gsawdy said:
Wow, Halfbit. Thank you for the very thorough answer. It sounds easily doable and I will definitely replace the 1TB drive.
I'm using dBpoweramp on an old notebook to rip my CDs so I don't have a use for the CD/DVD now. If the second 2 TB HD is installed how does the OS see it? As a second drive or can both be merged into one 4 TB drive? If one had ~4 T of music that would impose considerable demands on the backup USB system. Is there no way the second HD could be some sort of psuedo backup? It wouldn't be physically removable from the location of the VBA
Obviously I'm just wildly speculating now!
George
If you want to start hacking you could do all kinds of crazy stuff. Such as replacing the DVD with a drive pull-out for backup. If you add another drive to the system it will not recognize it. The best option is to reinstall and restore from a backup.
No desire to start hacking! I'll leave the DVD and use external backup as recommended. Besides by the time I need more than 2TB, the 4TB drives will be much cheaper so a single drive replacment will be the solution.
Thanks, George
Andrew said:
. . .
If you add another drive to the system it will not recognize it. The best option is to reinstall and restore from a backup.
Hi Andrew,
To keep folks from thinking the VBA is limited to one fixed disk, I think your response above is that without rebuilding VortexBox from an ISO, the system it will not recognize another disk drive. With a rebuild, an added disk will be recognized.
Correct?
HalfBit said:
Andrew said:
. . .
If you add another drive to the system it will not recognize it. The best option is to reinstall and restore from a backup.
Hi Andrew,
To keep folks from thinking the VBA is limited to one fixed disk, I think your response above is that without rebuilding VortexBox from an ISO, the system it will not recognize another disk drive. With a rebuild, an added disk will be recognized.
Correct?
You can add another disk without rebuilding. But now you are getting into "Hacking"
@halfbit - an excellent post - Andrew, if this could be added to the documentation it could save a lot of searching - just diy upgraded vba* to 2 TB with no trouble thanks to this instruction. Awesome. Cheers
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