REAL Intel SS4000 limits

[resle]

Greetings,
I've got an old Intel SS4000-E in my hands.
The official specs:

Intel® XScale® Processor based board, with a single Intel® XScale® 80219 processor, four Serial ATA hard disk drive carriers, one Intel® 31244 SATA Controller, dual Intel® 82541 Gigabit Ethernet Network controllers, 256MB of DDR SDRAM memory and a single 200 W power supply

Storage Capacity
Expandable to 1.0 TB – using four 250 GB drives
Expandable to 2.0 TB – using four 500 GB drives NOTE: For specific drive family and capacities supported

And the OS inside is based on Linux Kernel 2.6

Now... it says it's expandable to 2 TB Maximum using four 500gb drives. I wonder where the inherent limit is. Why couldn't I use, say, four 1 TB drives (or even 2TB)? Is it the controller perhaps? (I can't find any technical specs for it)

Before I go buying four new drives I'd like to hear your opinion
Thanks

andrea

 

[00Roush]

This might help... http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/ss4000-e/sb/ss4000e_thol_22.pdf Scroll down to the hard drives section and it does list at least one 1000 GB drive (Hitachi) that does look to be compatible. My understanding is that technically any SATA drive should work with any SATA controller but in practice some drives might not work correctly. Same thing happens with memory. I did come across this as well so you might need to disable SSC on some drives that support it for everything to work correctly.

00Roush

 

[morbidz]

running 4x2tb Hitachi drives, no issues

 

[nadtz]

I've been running 4x1.5 tb's for over a year and know 2tb's will work, the docs were probably written to cya for Intel in case larger drives had issues in the future.