On Sat, 21 Feb 1998, christopher williams wrote:
Upper Management[tm] thought we'd save money by assembling drive cannisters and drives ourselves.
Even if we had to pay someone $200/hour to assemble the drives, we would still come out way ahead, so your Upper Management may have a point there...
A couple of the shells got broken when they had to be disassembled to be put together correctly.
... but then again, we didn't break any of ours. ;-) Getting those canisters apart is a *real* pain, and they cost a couple hundred bucks each. I had to do it a couple of times (once because I thought the LED strip was hooked up wrong, but it turned out to be the Netapp)... I don't think Netapp needs to worry about anyone swapping drives around on them. ;-)
Also, instead of simply replacing the entire cannister, Upper Management[tm] decided that it would much cheaper to instead pull the cannisters apart and just replace the bad *drive*.
DIY support? I do not recommend it.
It's a viable option if you simply don't have the resources to buy all Netapp components. I'll note that our seven other filers are all using Netapp-sourced drives and RAM (budgetary deadlines and laziness on my part account for most of that).