Hello All:
Voice from the dead here. I do not check the cow very often since the layoff in March. Before I answer Nathan's question, I want to clear some air first: 1) The downfall of Ciprico isn't due to the CEO or CFO - both are very professional individuals, and I had great pleasure working with both of them as well as everyone else at Ciprico - and I miss everyone (especially you - the customers) very much. The main problem was just lack of sales and some bad timing of world events. If you don't believe it - look at yesterdays' news, where Sony announced world-wide layoffs, and Sony is a way larger company than Ciprico. 2) As far as why I'm not supporting you from One-Stop-Systems - I don't have an answer for that: You'd have to ask them. I was contracted for a short time by Ciprico to train Kevin Bare, and he's been doing an excellent job. 3) I know MediaVault owners want to have hope - but there is absolutely nothing left at the Ciprico MN office, from what I've heard. Contrary to popular belief, the CA office closed it's doors a long time ago - probably a week or two after I trained Kevin - maybe in May or June. Finally, the storage industry is constantly evolving - the MediaVault product grew from what was once some of the ashes of a hard drive company (Micropolis), to Medea, to Huge, to Ciprico. But at each of these places along the road traveled, there were forks in the road, and multiple paths to be taken. I can't really discuss where I am now, but I am on one of those paths. One posting here referred to Ciprico being a software company - I hate to say it, but maybe the next major path is a pure-software path, such as RaidCore or the place I'm working at now.
Now for Nathan's answer: Attach the serial cable to side A, pull out all of the drives from side B. The unit should power up. Go into the menu (H), and (This is from 7 or so month old memory) select the option to enable the drives to spin up in sleep mode (I think it's option A). After a confirmation, it should return to the menu, now power off the unit, pull all of the drives from side A and put in the drives on side B (Do not use the drives from side A), and repeat the procedure. It's important to note that this setting changes the firmware on the drives (Not the MediaVault), so once they are in this mode, they can't be used in another MediaVault unless it has firmware which supports this feature.
On the other guy who has the 320R who is putting in 500GB drives - 19D was the last publically released firmware that I'm aware of - it works with 500GB drives (Your OS on your computer might not, though - if it doesn't, put the array into a RAID 0 turbo mode or a RAID 3 mode). Other firmware was undoubtably in the works, but may not have been released.
Also, quick note for Bob: Ciprico did not use store-bought drives - most stores had our rejects. We bought directly from the manufacturer and ran them through a screening process - any drives which did not meet our criteria were sent back as failed (even a single sector). This in mind, there is a difference between a Ciprico drive and a store-bought drive (Also, on MediaVault U320s and above (Excluding RAIDCore-based ones), only Hitachi drives were used. Older models of MediaVaults sometimes used Maxtor or WD drives - we never used Seagate.
Anyway, I can't say too much about where I'm working at the moment, except the technology is what could have been the next generation of MediaVault if Ciprico went down that path. I have been on the other side, and have experienced an order of magnitude of features, speed, and power.
I also want to wish all of my friends - all of you. Very happy holidays.
Lance
p.s. I won't receive the response if you reply to this via e-mail, but will check the Cow from time to time.
Lance Gropper
Ciprico, Inc.
