Numerous persons have told me that 3rd party drives are forbidden in the NetApp support contract.
But we want a lot of storage...and NetApp charges three times as much... and both drives are Seagate...and here is the text of the support contract at http://now.netapp.com/NOW/products/agreement/agree_2000.shtml:
2.8 Exclusions. Our warranties and maintenance agreements do not apply to, nor do prices include maintenance of, the repair or diagnosis of damage, malfunctions or product failures caused by: (a) you or any third party; (b) accident, misuse or abuse; (c) the installation, repair or alteration of our product (including modification of software) by anyone other than us or a NetApp Service Provider; (d) products not sold by NetApp that are attached to or used with our products, even if those products are sold by one of our authorized resellers...
Which I take to mean that that they fix only the NetApp supplied part of the device, if something breaks. This same clause appears to regulate 3rd party drives and tape backup units, which are of course, very widespread.
I also note that a large number of Seagate drives are listed as compatible in http://now.netapp.com/NOW/download/tools/diskfw/, although the model numbers use a slightly different format than the Seagate site uses.
There is also the NOW page about disk qualification (http://now.netapp.com/NOW/download/tools/diskqual/) which includes the following text:
The Disk Qualification Requirement text file adds information about second-source disk drives to the device qualification matrix in your filer.
The only 72 gigabyte FC Seagate that I can find has a slightly different part number from the one mentioned in the NetApp support documents, but I had been hoping the difference wasn't significant. Looks like it is, though. I suspect the difference is that NetApp wants to use 520 byte sectors, and Seagate defaults to 512, and I don't know how to switch.
So I am surprised that everyone thinks that 3rd party drives are forbidden by the support agreement. I agree that they aren't supported, but that isn't the same thing as geing forbidden.
Daniel Feenberg feenberg@nber.org