Steve,
Mixing drives in the way you expanded your aggregate is perfectly fine.
If anything, you've added raid groups that have a better performance
footprint, so you may see an overall increase in performance as WAFL
writes across raidgroups during CPs.
The performance issues you mentioned would come from adding a slower
drive to a RG with faster drives - thus bringing down the overall
performance (this is not the case in your situation).
You should attempt to keep one spare of each drive type if at all
possible, but ONTAP will select a drive of lesser speed if no other
spare is available.
Summary: The thing to avoid here is adding slower drives to raid groups
with faster drives, or allowing a failed drive to rebuild on a drive
with a slower speed thus bringing down the overall performance of the
RG\AGGR.
Glenn
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-toasters(a)mathworks.com [mailto:owner-toasters@mathworks.com]
On Behalf Of Stephen C. Losen
Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2006 6:11 PM
To: toasters(a)mathworks.com
Subject: mixing disk RPMs in aggregate?
We just bought two new shelves of ATA drives to enlarge an
aggregate on our R200 and the new drives are all 7200 RPM
while the old drives are 5400 RPM, same size though.
It looks like ONTAP will let me add the new disks to the aggregate
if I use the -f (force) flag. I'm inclined to force, unless this
ruin performance or make the filer crash.
We keep two hot spares, so should I have one of each RPM?
Steve Losen scl(a)virginia.edu phone: 434-924-0640
University of Virginia ITC Unix Support