There was a discussion on this topic back in 1997 - here's what Sean O'Malley had to say on the subject. Naturally, the F520 is not the upgrade choice now, it would be the F720.
Andrew Bond Systems Engineer, NetApp UK
Subject: Re: upgrading Pentium 90 on F330 To: barron@texas.net (Jonah Yokubaitis) Cc: sean@netapp.com, quinlan@transmeta.com, toasters@mathworks.com
I seemed to have unintentionally opened a can of worms here in trying to stop people from trying to upgrade to higher clock speed pentiums. The offcially netapp policy is: 1) we don't recommend it as it doesn't provide any performance gain 2) we don't support such modifications - you may be voiding their warranty 3) we discourage this sort of tinkering - the previous note was just mentioning what I saw in the lab, and wasn't encouraging this sort of activity. 4) No such beast has ever gone through QA and you DON'T want to run a configuation with a non-standard nor QA'ed mother board. The offical Sean O'Malley policy is buy a 520...I spent a good three or four months trying to make the pentium boxes go faster and if I had suceeded there would have been an F340. Messing around with the pentium boxes is a waste of time. If you have a real performance problem with any of the pentium based machine the 520 is the answer. Or get another box and split the load.
Sean O'Malley
At 05:09 pm 2/4/99 -0800, you wrote:
Has anyone considered upgrading the CPU on their NetApp product? It's a closed product, so NetApp won't talk about it, but it seems to me that the Pentium 90 in my F230 (66mhz external speed, 90mhz core?) could be replaced with a Pentium 133 with the same 66mhz external speed without any need for jumpers, etc.
My NetApp is in heavy service, so I'm a bit hesitant. Has anyone tried this, or does anyone have a NetApp in light service that they'd like to try this with?
I've searched the listserve archive and don't see any subjects that would seem to have previously addressed this.
Somewhat busy CPU:
CPU NFS CIFS HTTP Net kB/s Disk kB/s Tape kB/s Cache in out read write read write age 24% 431 0 0 74 672 573 0 0 0 2 36% 639 0 0 149 1035 768 0 0 0 2 30% 524 0 0 129 708 639 0 0 0 2 44% 868 0 0 158 925 868 0 0 0 2 42% 857 0 0 179 734 560 0 0 0 2 37% 658 0 0 133 735 1069 0 0 0 2 29% 494 0 0 100 737 752 0 0 0 2 27% 459 0 0 80 834 724 0 0 0 2 44% 886 0 0 189 1078 668 0 0 0 2 53% 717 0 0 151 923 2249 35 0 0 2 86% 589 0 0 104 1050 2678 3423 0 0 2 28% 535 0 0 101 563 212 0 0 0 2 36% 712 0 0 133 654 244 0 0 0 2
Regarding cache age, this unit already has the full 256M of RAM, so we can't address that issue in the conventional way either.
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