The Upgrade:

First thing I did was look in the Web interface to see what the device sees currently and how the system is laid out:

The Main menu on the Snap server is this.  To check the disk status and size, go to Disk Utilities.

Here you can see both drives are running fine, and are both recognized.  The Snap Drive gives you some options in partitioning. These are both independent single disks. But you can choose Mirrored or RAID 0.

There is NO performance advantage of striping the disks. It improves the speed 0%. Infact in some tests I saw speed DROP This is cause of the overhead that Striping causes. The disk access speed is bottle necked by the IDE bus, not the drives. 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM run the same on THIS Snap. Newer snaps are probably more powerful.

Now that we know how the machine is set up, lets go and put a 40GB drive on, this will 2x increase the capacity of this device just alone, we could put 2 of them on and 4x the disk space. For now just one is good enough to test the ability to be upgraded. 

AND THE RESULTS... Did it Detect it?? did it know what to do with the existing partitions???

All you have is 4 LED's on the front to see what's happening until the web server comes online.  There was a LOAD of drive activity and there still was when the interface came up. Here is what I saw when I went into disk status:

WHOOOHOOO! Meridian made a machine that was as robust as I anticipated. It took the foreign drive and started to write its file table to it, but I still didn't know if it would see all 40 GB or not.

And there we go folks!!  Removing BOTH original drives and just throwing on a drive I had laying around on, and in 10 min time I made a device which lists for 480$ up to the space of a 700$ device.  For 300$ I could take this device to 160 - 200GB if I wanted!

Check it out, the date is back in the past also... This thing is just a nostalgia box all out ;)

How it Shows Up on a Network :

Conclusion:

Now I guess you are asking "So what does this do for me?"  Well on Ebay you can get older small space Snaps for cheap, buy one, and make a hard disk backup box, CD image box ( what I used it for, was a great place to put them), Lan File server (I used it for that also a few times). You can take one of the smaller 5 GB devices and make a 200GB file server out of them (If the hardware is close enough to the same).  How sweet is that?!

This doesn't rank as technically advanced as the iOpener hacks and upgrades but it sure was fun, and since this is the only one on the web so far about this, it may help start a new lil hobby.  Just remember my philosophy when working on devices to make them do something they are not supposed to: Exploit opportunities that the company has left open in order for it to save costs on, construction, repairs, service, or ease of use. Also if you see a company making one device function at many levels at different price points, you can prolly cheaper and easier make the low one better than the top end one cheaper on your own.

If anyone has any info on the serial header Please contact me, I would love to get the specs on this Linux Kernel.  If you can hack the serial console, you could in theory turn this device into far more than a file server, you could turn it into a full blown web server, Network services server, DB server.. etc..   

Happy Hacking!

If you have any comments or Questions please email me at Joe@ProCooling.com